Discharge Procedures (1)
Reading through the gallery, I quietly glanced to my side.
There was Shiho, shamelessly posting her own tribute thread.
She met my eyes.
"...What?"
"Nothing. Really."
Good for her, having that much self-esteem.
"It does feel a little empty, doesn't it?"
She was right on the mark — the cardiology ward had gone quiet. It was the fruit of my scrambling to fabricate transfer reasons and smuggle patients out of the hospital, one by one.
Thanks to that, cardiology and every department with no confirmed resonance had managed to send their patients away.
I'd wanted to get as many people out of the other departments as possible, too... but this was the limit of what I could do.
Even so, I kept digging through the hospital records. To send out even one more patient who could plausibly be transferred. To free even a single soul from this hell.
As I scrolled through the EMR, Shiho settled into the empty chair beside me.
"Jeong-uk. Got a minute?"
"Of course. Go ahead."
"You realize we're in pretty dangerous territory now, right?"
I nodded. We'd transferred out far too many patients. The resonated doctors had reached the stage where they were starting to question whether I was really a true doctor at all. A doctor who never saw patients and did nothing but order transfers — they suspected I was some lazy fraud cooking up excuses because the work annoyed me.
"Honestly, we did push it a bit."
The cardiology inpatients were no problem. Most of them had genuinely serious heart conditions, so there'd been no need to invent phantom illnesses to justify their transfers. The other departments were another matter entirely.
The resonated "true doctors" in those departments refused to tolerate their patients going anywhere else. So to smuggle their patients out, I'd had to take a small — but reckless — gamble.
"We leaned way too hard on hemodialysis transfers."
Hemodialysis was an almost criminally convenient excuse. So I set about making other patients "need hemodialysis."
It wasn't even that hard. There's a certain drug that, when overdosed, sends the kidney-related blood markers swinging wildly. Using it, I secretly slipped a handful of pills to perfectly healthy patients, then pulled them from their departments on the grounds that their blood values had spiked dangerously — and transferred them out to other hospitals.
Operation Malingering, if you will. It was a trick only available to us because cardiology prescribes that particular drug day in and day out.
The problem was that right around the time we'd successfully gotten a substantial number of patients out, the other departments began tightening the noose around our necks.
"The OB-GYN professors came to protest, demanding to know how numbers like these were even possible."
Until now, I'd crushed the doubt under the authority of internal medicine. What would you people know about blood? We know it better. I'd been stomping out suspicion that way, but frankly, we were at the breaking point. Not only was escaping this way no longer possible — they'd started watching us.
"I was prepared for this."
Of course I'd anticipated it. They weren't idiots; no one sits still while patients are being siphoned off right under their noses. But with a chance to free even one more person on the table, passing it up to protect my own skin would have been a waste.
"By the way, Shiho — do you happen to know the guidelines for proper antibiotic use?"
"You mean dosing them properly so resistance doesn't develop?"
She'd had medical knowledge injected into her as items back in her checkpoint-guard days, so the conversation moved fast.
"Yes. Exactly."
Antibiotics must always be taken with the intent to annihilate every last bacterium. The moment a few survivors linger and become resistant strains, you're out of options.
I think escape works the same way.
"We have to get people out while we still can — before the entities work out a countermeasure."
Scroll, scroll.
I murmured it as I paged down the patient list.
"Anyway, everyone who could leave has already left."
Plenty of patients remained, of course. But the ones left behind were people whose conditions made this kind of malingering impossible, so we'd be hunting for another method.
"We can stop sneaking the pills out after tonight."
"Got it."
Shiho nodded.
"Sneaking past the guards was pretty thrilling, I'll admit... but honestly, it scared me too."
She tucked the last pill bottle into her cleavage and rose from her chair.
Streeetch. Yaaawn.
She finished a stretch that was suggestive in a way I chose not to dwell on.
"Oh, by the way, Jeong-uk. There's something I've been wondering about."
Pointing at the cleavage (allegedly) containing the bottle, she asked:
"My medical knowledge base had no idea malingering was even possible with these drugs. Where did you learn that?"
"Ah, that."
I thought of the man who'd shown me the trick.
"It's how the Department Chair got caught trying to dodge the draft."
"...I'm sorry, what?"
Whenever the Department Chair went out for drinks, he'd hold forth about it like it was some legendary feat of arms.
"See, even with terrible kidney values, you can still get out of military service. So the Chair quietly manipulated his numbers with drugs to dodge the draft."
"Uh... hm..."
"The physical, I think it was? You had to fail it three times?"
To be exempted, he needed to produce bad kidney values on three separate tests. He passed — or rather, failed — the first two. But on the third...
"Turns out his stomach was upset the night before, so he took less of the drug."
His values came out only somewhat terrible on the third go, and once his kidney numbers recovered, off to the army he went.
And the only people who knew that secret were a handful of close friends inside our own cardiology department.
"...Isn't that a crime?"
"It is."
A crime that couldn't be defended from any angle. But that malingering trick had saved a great many people this time, so couldn't we generously call it a good crime?
"That's probably why you don't know about it, Shiho."
Her injected knowledge would consist of "legitimate treatments" — dark knowledge like this was almost certainly far outside its scope.
"Besides, it'd be stranger to scrupulously obey the law against entities, don't you think?"
They don't follow any rules; there was no reason for us to insist on fair play.
I shrugged and turned back to the chart. The expression on Shiho's face as she listened looked vaguely dissatisfied.
Over the past few days, Shiho, I, and Winnie's officers had run every kind of thought experiment — simulation after simulation — searching for other escape routes out of the hospital.
To put the conclusion first: nothing worked. Every method except transfer had come up dead. As of now, escaping by any means other than a transfer looked out of reach.
Do I need to find another malingering trick?
That would be risky — these days I was skating on dangerously thin ice suspicion-wise myself.
And then, one day, while I was on rounds, a man came looking for me.
"The name is Park Gangjae."
"What can I do for you?"
A man introducing himself out of nowhere.
"Why is it that I am given no medication?"
He'd apparently been someone of consequence out in the world, because he carried on with tremendous bluster.
"I have been observing most carefully, and you have been sending perfectly healthy people out left and right. Why, then, not me?"
At his words, I asked him to wait a moment and began flipping through patient charts.
Park Gangjae, Park Gangjae...
Found him.
An acute kidney injury patient.
No wonder I hadn't given him the drug. This particular trick — deliberately tanking your kidney values — only works on people with healthy kidneys. Use it on someone whose kidneys are already failing, and you wouldn't be planning his escape from the hospital. You'd be planning his escape from this world.
I explained this to him slowly, piece by piece.
"Sir. Your kidney function is poor. If I gave you this medication, it could do serious harm."
"Spare me. Are you saying you neglect me because I have not paid you as the others have? Here. I shall give you money, so transfer me out, and quickly."
I froze on the spot.
I'm sorry — what? Money?
Did I look like someone out hunting for money in this situation?
Anger boiled up in my chest. The moment goodwill is received as anything but goodwill — no matter how many times you live through it, you never get used to it.
But I steadied myself and pushed the fury back down. Right. He's anxious, that's all. Everyone else was anxious too.
I clicked the ballpoint pen in my pocket to calm myself. A habit I'd picked up ever since chewing out the streamer Ji-hye. Half-suspecting that she'd become famous — and resonated — because I'd yelled at her, I'd been doing my level best never to take my anger out on patients.
"Sir, we're looking into other options right now, so if you could just—"
But for all my effort, the rude man in front of me was immovable.
"You think I'll swallow that? They called my kidney trouble acute, did they not? Acute. You think I do not know what acute means? It turns bad for a moment and then it gets better. Is that not so?"
Nothing of the sort. A patient who's been through one bout of acute kidney injury can lose their kidneys for good with a single wrong step. Left unwatched for even a few months, it's a disease that can march straight into end-stage renal failure.
"Even so, this method would be far too dangerous for you."
"Ah, I see. Not enough money, is it? Young professor, is that not rather too greedy of you?"
He firmly believed the people who'd escaped before him had paid me off.
I had no confidence I could keep my composure while meeting those eyes, so I shut them tight and spoke.
"Please leave. I will not do that for you."
"Ha! Ha! The youth of today, truly."
He jabbed a finger at me.
"I looked up your articles. Says here you only became a professor out of sheer luck?"
"..."
"No ability, playing the expert from that chair of yours. Are you not ashamed before your father? Your father was not that kind of man. And a young pup like you, stuffing your hands in your pockets while your elders speak—"
THWACK!
Before he could even finish.
Shiho's clean straight punch buried itself in the man's jaw.
"And listening and listening, I hear — what kind of beast raises a son like this?"
Looking down at the man, eyes rolled back and out cold, Shiho said:
"Professor, were you really just going to stand there and take that?"
Instead of answering, I pulled my fist out of my pocket.
"I was planning to hit him after hearing him out. That's what makes it self-defense."
"Ah."
Shiho nodded solemnly, then pointed at the fallen patient.
"Care to hit him now, while you still have the chance?"
I shook my head.
"You punch far better than I do. I'll pass."
A day passed after all that. Insults like that are par for the course when you practice medicine in a hospital, so I forgot the patient almost immediately.
Maybe I'll treat myself to some boneless sweet-and-sour chicken today.
I'd just finished rounds — routine now — and was picking through the considerably more luxurious lunch menu when someone came up behind me.
"It's been a while, hasn't it, Professor Lee?"
"Ah — Professor Kim."
Professor Kim Seok-tae of psychiatry. A.K.A. Professor Kim. My mentor, now fully resonated.
He was waving at me with a smile.
"How have you been lately?"
"Fine, thank you."
"I seeee..."
Professor Kim nodded slowly.
"As it happens, we have a patient in our department requesting a joint consultation. Might you come see him?"
"You're unable to leave the closed ward?"
"Right. His seizures are severe. You'll need to come to his bedside yourself, Professor Lee."
Every fiber of me wanted to refuse. He was asking me to walk into the psychiatric ward — the undisputed final boss of all the hospital's wards, where ghost stories were concerned. It amounted to an invitation to come die.
But refusing a consultation once it had been formally requested was not the act of a "true doctor." Considering that the only reason I was still safe in this hospital — with half its departments eyeing me with suspicion — was my recognized status as a "true doctor," what would happen if I refused needed no imagination whatsoever.
"...I'll do the consultation right now."
"You could eat lunch first."
"I have a schedule this afternoon."
More to the point, my appetite had evaporated.
The moment I said I was heading for the closed ward, Shiho — who'd been agonizing between options A, B, and C — declared she was coming too.
"I am your bodyguard, after all."
she whispered.
Professor Kim tilted his head at her.
"And this would be...?"
"Ah, our new fellow."
"I see, I see. Well then, hello. I'm Kim Seok-tae."
She happened to be wearing her cardiology gown with her own name embroidered on it, so he believed her at once.
And so we found ourselves heading, without any warning at all, for the closed ward. Toward that place — the so-called final boss among all resonated entities.
And when we stepped into the isolation room where the patient was held, what we saw was —
"Uuuuugghh..."
"This patient suffers from severe delusions. He's in considerable pain, yet he keeps trying to discharge himself. So we scheduled a frontal lobotomy for tomorrow — but his blood pressure won't stabilize, so the surgery keeps getting pushed back."
Bound at all four limbs, gagged, tears streaming down his face —
it was yesterday's patient.