Chapter 108
Srrrk.
My consciousness sank beneath the surface.
And something began filling that empty space.
I,
No.
To be precise, the cardiology specter wearing Han Hyeonjae's skin opened his eyes.
The cardiology specter frowned as soon as he opened his eyes.
The rotor's ear-rending noise, the violent vibrations rising from below, and the stench of sweat and aviation fuel.
He looked around, confirmed the cramped cabin and the sea outside the window, and was horrified.
“What the fuck!”
A raspy curse burst out of my mouth in my own voice.
Professor Kang Hyunjun beside me stared at me in surprise.
“Huh? Hey, what's wrong with you all of a sudden….”
But that confusion didn't last even a second.
The owner of my body instantly sharpened his gaze.
And as if the profanity from just now had been an auditory hallucination, he put on a very calm and polite expression.
“Ah, no. I’m sorry.”
He cleared his throat once, then reached out to Professor Kang, who was sweating buckets as he tried to find the correct spot for chest compressions.
“Um, switch hands, please. I’ll do it.”
His voice was calm.
‘…Oh?’
I was impressed.
He was nothing like the God of the Scalpel.
That bastard had started using informal speech the moment he possessed me, but this gentleman at least knew manners.
‘At the very least, he feels… more refined than he did in the gallery, I guess.’
Come to think of it, doctors in internal medicine do tend to have that smart, gentlemanly image.
On the other hand, surgeons use their bodies and deal with blood, so they’re bound to have shorter tempers.
Of course, not every surgeon is a demon, and not every internist is a gentleman.
In the end, it’s person by person, and in a hospital there are plenty of idiots throwing hissy fits in both internal medicine and surgery.
Anyway….
‘So the God of the Scalpel really was just the human trash who condensed all of surgery’s hysteria into one person….’
No, let’s stop thinking about that here.
The guy borrowing my body right now was also a notorious trash-talker in the gallery, second to none when it came to a foul mouth.
The cardiology specter skillfully placed his hands on the patient's chest and began compressions.
At the same time, his eyes moved nonstop.
He checked the memo I had left just before the possession.
[Electrical Storm / SGB please ]
The cardiology specter muttered in a very small voice.
“SGB? Do I look like an anesthesiologist, you crazy bastard.”
He looked like he was complaining with great enthusiasm.
But it wasn't a refusal.
Besides, he had always gone around bragging that he was an SGB expert.
Professor Kang Hyunjun wiped away sweat and raised his head.
“Hyeonjae. Are you really going to do SGB?”
Professor Kang's eyes were full of doubt and worry.
No matter how you looked at it, performing a procedure in this situation was a gamble.
My mouth opened.
“Well, professor. Theoretically, to calm a sympathetic storm….”
That was exactly when it happened.
Beep—
Beep. Beep.
The warning sounds from the monitor stopped, and regular beeps began to sound.
The messy, erratic waveform settled down, and a narrow but regular QRS waveform appeared.
“Huh? We got it!”
Ahn Nayeon shouted.
“ROSC
(* return of spontaneous circulation)
It’s back! I can feel a pulse!”
Professor Kang hurriedly felt for the patient's carotid artery.
“It's beating! It's back!”
Ah, the heart is beating again.
After the fifth shot and the stubborn CPR, the heart had finally returned to its place.
“Phew….”
Professor Kang let out a deep sigh of relief and collapsed onto the floor.
The taut tension inside the helicopter suddenly released.
“Hyeonjae. Good enough, right? We’ve got ROSC now, and the rhythm is stable. We’ll be at the hospital soon enough… so let’s not do any dangerous procedure and just monitor him on the way. We’ll be there in 20 minutes.”
Professor Kang waved his hands and tried to wrap things up.
That was a perfectly reasonable judgment.
There was no reason to stick a needle in his neck when his heart had already come back.
But.
“No.”
Professor Kang's eyes went wide.
“What?”
“We have to put the needle in.”
The cardiology specter didn't back down even a little.
“We've got ROSC, and the patient's heart has come back now. Why?”
Professor Kang said, sounding exasperated.
“Don't you know? He hasn't fully come back yet.”
He pointed at the monitor.
“His sympathetic nervous system is overactive, so even a small stimulus could trigger VF again. Then he might not come back for real.”
“Still, it's only about 20 minutes to the hospital.”
“Twenty minutes? This patient's heart won't last even two minutes.”
The owner of my body was resolute.
“We have to stop the storm.”
He checked the portable ultrasound unit tucked in the corner of the helicopter.
“Give me the ultrasound.”
Ahn Nayeon hurriedly rummaged out the portable ultrasound unit that was wedged into a corner of the cramped cabin.
The power came on and the screen flickered.
Professor Kang Hyunjun still couldn't seem to let go and hurriedly spoke up.
“Wait. We’re almost there anyway… you know… if the problem is an electrical storm, we could just use a beta-blocker, right? There’s no need for this dangerous procedure…”
The cardiology specter let out a deep sigh.
“Professor.”
“Oh, Hyeonjae.”
“Are you talking about esmolol?”
“Blood pressure.”
“…BP?”
“Look at his blood pressure right now.”
Only then did Professor Kang turn his head toward the monitor.
[BP 80 / 50]
That was the blood pressure of a patient who had just come back from cardiac arrest.
The myocardial infarction had the heart muscle on strike, and repeated shocks had left the blood vessels in tatters.
“His systolic is 80 right now. You want to use a beta-blocker that would reduce cardiac contractility? He'll go into cardiogenic shock instantly.”
Professor Kang's jaw dropped.
“And most importantly.”
The cardiology specter turned his head and nodded toward the emergency cart.
“There isn't even any esmolol in this helicopter. As far as I know, it's mostly resuscitation drugs. Even if there were a beta-blocker, it'd only be something like labetalol, and we can't use that in this situation.”
“…Right.”
Professor Kang Hyunjun had no words to argue back.
There was no drug, and the blood pressure wasn't usable either.
There was only one method left.
“Then I'll put it in.”
The cardiology specter placed the probe against the patient's neck.
The helicopter was still rattling.
‘Does this even make sense?’
His hand wasn't shaking.
So the gallery really was full of nothing but lunatics.
A black-and-white cross section of the inside of the neck appeared on the screen.
“Yes. I can see it.”
Without hesitation, the cardiology specter jabbed a lidocaine-filled needle into the skin of the neck.
On the ultrasound screen, the white tip of the needle was seen skimming perilously past the carotid artery.
It was a distance where even the slightest miss could puncture a vessel and cause massive bleeding, but fortunately the needle reached its target exactly.
“Injecting.”
As he pushed the plunger, the medication spread on the screen.
1 cc, 2 cc, 5 cc….
After a little while….
Beep—
The rough, irregular heart rate began to calm noticeably.
The heart rate, which had been hovering above 140, dropped sharply to 100, then 90.
The many premature beats decorating the ECG monitor vanished as if they had been a lie.
It worked.
The storm stopped.
The cardiology specter calmly withdrew the needle and pressed gauze to the neck.
Signs of Horner's syndrome appeared as the patient's left eyelid drooped slightly.
It was proof that the procedure had gone in perfectly.
Another seven minutes or so of flying passed like that.
The H mark on our hospital's rooftop began to come into view outside the window.
The helicopter lowered its altitude as it prepared to land.
“Hyeonjae.”
“Yes, professor.”
“You’re a second-year, right?”
The cardiology specter replied tersely with a sour expression.
“…Yes.”
Thunk.
The helicopter settled onto the hospital rooftop helipad, and before the rotor's roar had even faded, the door opened.
A number of people in vinyl PPE came to meet us, dragging a stretcher along with a fierce gust of wind.
They were the cardiology team and the emergency medicine staff.
“Patient coming down! Watch out!”
As we lifted the patient onto the rooftop stretcher, the cardiology fellow asked anxiously,
“How's the patient doing? I heard he arrested on the way here!”
The cardiology specter shouted as he pushed the stretcher.
“After ROSC, there was a VF storm, so we performed an SGB inside the helicopter! The rhythm is stable now!”
“Huh?”
The fellow nearly tripped while running.
“You did what?”
“I said I did an SGB! I confirmed left-sided Horner's syndrome! The sympathetic nerves are blocked, so the rhythm shouldn't go haywire for a while! You can go ahead and open him up right away!”
“Ah… ah… yes, yes!”
The fellow nodded with a dazed expression.
He looked like he couldn't quite believe that an SGB had been done inside the helicopter, but the patient was alive and well—and even arrived with a stable rhythm—so he couldn't really argue.
And so the patient disappeared into the elevator, surrounded by countless medical staff, to get the blocked vessel opened up.
Only the sound of the wind remained on the rooftop again.
Professor Kang Hyunjun and Ahn Nayeon also went back to the helicopter to clean up the equipment.
The cardiology specter stood alone, leaning against the wall of the stairwell building by the rooftop railing.
Then he looked up at the sky and let out a deep sigh.
“Haa….”
He lifted my hand and stared at it in silence.
The sensation of a hand that had saved a person, felt after such a long time.
The cardiology specter let out a snort of laughter and muttered softly,
“Han Hyeonjae… so the helicopter slave's name was Hyeonjae.”
He left his final words with a bitter smile.
“Han Hyeonjae, you son of a bitch….”
Srrrk.
The world turned once again.