Poster Presentation (Part 2)
After a hellish commute, I collapsed into my tiny studio apartment like a corpse. I flung my bag onto the floor, ripped off my tie, and unbuttoned my crumpled shirt as I dragged myself toward the sofa.
"Ugh... Ah... I'm so tired..."
I closed my eyes, but sleep refused to come. Behind my eyelids, the cursed words Autumn Scientific Conference flickered mockingly.
Friday midnight deadline. Draft submission by tomorrow noon. Professor Cheon Eunjeong's bright, devilish face floated into my mind.
I forced myself to sit up. First... where do I even start? PubMed? Or... the Gallery?
PubMed was the holy land of medical researchers, an endless ocean of information. I shook my head. No. I have a cheat-code compass right here. A compass with a terrible personality but flawless performance.
The Deceased Medical Scientists Gallery.
What? Then how on earth am I supposed to search? I quietly waited for the next comment.
I sprang up, rushed to my desk, and booted up my laptop.
I frantically hammered away at the keyboard and clicked the mouse.
Finally, Mes-ui Sin, who had been quietly watching from the sidelines, chimed in.
These ghosts were still annoying and obnoxious, but at the same time, I couldn't help but respect them.
This relentless academic passion that hadn't cooled even in death, and this twisted eagerness to teach their junior—though I hated to think of myself as one.
Sitting in front of my laptop, I squeezed my empty brain and mapped out my plan.
Prevalence, mechanism, prognosis. I just needed to build the skeleton of the paper around these three pillars.
What next? Now that I have the skeleton, I need the flesh. My case. My patient's data.
Ah, right. EMR. Fuck. EMR. Electronic Medical Records. They could only be accessed through the hospital's internal network. And right now, I was sitting at the desk in my studio apartment.
Sigh... what do I do? Who's on the night shift today? I mentally scanned my co-residents' schedule.
Since Kim Ji-hoon and I had the day shift, the night shift must be... first-year Jo Suyeon?
Should I ask her to send me the EMR data? A devilish whisper echoed in my head.
No, that's a bad idea, right? But the voice of reason immediately crushed the whisper.
Yeah, obviously. It's a massive violation of personal privacy laws.
I didn't even need to look it up to know it would violate the Medical Service Act. I had to go through the proper channels. Yes. Giving up my day off tomorrow, crawling back into the hospital, formally requesting access to the medical records, and organizing the data at my desk—that was the only way.
Still... just in case, I decided to make a post. Who knew? Maybe there was some bizarre, genius trick known only to these dead doctors.
...Ah.
Let's just look up papers today. And tomorrow, on my day off... my precious day off... I'll go to the hospital... Let's do this.
I sat back down in front of my laptop. I began searching using the keywords BackInMyDay had given me.
'atypical presentation of ACS' (Atypical presentation of Acute Coronary Syndrome).
Hundreds of papers flooded the screen.
"Wow... how am I supposed to read all of this?"
Following his advice, I scanned the titles. After scrolling frantically through dozens of them, one paper caught my eye.
'Acute Myocardial Infarction Presenting as Isolated Sore Throat: A Case Series and Literature Review'.
"Oh! This is it! This has to be it!"
I checked the journal's name. The American Journal of Emergency Medicine. It was a highly reputable journal in the field of emergency medicine.
I returned to the search results page. This time, I began looking for papers on the mechanism, just as HematologyOncologyIsHell had suggested.
A review paper filled with numerous anatomical diagrams and neural circuit schematics caught my attention. It explained how pain signals originating from the heart travel up the spinal cord and get mixed with sensory nerve signals from the neck and jaw entering at the same spinal segment, causing the brain to misinterpret the source of the pain.
Receiving real-time coaching, I began gathering papers one by one. Statistical papers showing that patients with atypical symptoms have worse prognoses, and other case reports of delayed diagnoses due to patients seeking ENT treatment after mistaking their condition for a simple sore throat.
Time flew by at a breakneck pace. I drank three more cups of coffee.
Yet, strangely, a bizarre sense of exhilaration outweighed my exhaustion. It felt as if scattered fragments of knowledge were fitting together into one massive picture, centered around the ghosts' nagging and my own case.
By the time the clock pointed to 1:31 AM, fifteen PDF files to be used as references were neatly organized in a folder on my laptop.
"Phew... It's finally over..."
I leaned all the way back in my chair, staring blankly at the ceiling. I had just crossed the most treacherous mountain.