Chapter 38
When I opened my eyes, the first thing to greet me was the familiar fluorescent light on the emergency room ceiling.
And then, right after that, horrible pain came crashing over me like a wave.
“Ugh….”
As I turned my head with a groan, I saw the IV line inserted into my arm.
So I was lying on a bed in the corner of the ER, hooked up to an IV.
Looking at the clock, about three or four hours had passed since I fainted.
If I’d known the penalty would hurt this much, I never would’ve used it… Aaaagh…
I screamed inwardly.
This isn’t muscle soreness. It’s torture.
That bastard, Scalpel God.
And he gets to run off comfortably to the afterlife.
While I writhed in pain, the curtain beside the bed slid open.
It was Park Se-young.
Her face was a mixture of fatigue and complicated emotions.
“…Hyeon-jae.”
Park Se-young pulled over a chair and sat beside my bed.
“How are you feeling?”
“I feel like I’m going to die….”
“Your blood work and ECG are both normal, so don’t worry too much.”
Park Se-young stayed silent for a moment before speaking in a heavy voice.
“For now, you seem to be in pretty bad shock, so write it tomorrow.”
I was briefly moved by her consideration.
She’s worried about my condition.
“Huh? Write what…?”
I asked back, genuinely puzzled.
Did she mean I should do my backlogged charting tomorrow?
“The report.”
...
…Huh?
The report I know?
That cursed document that marks the beginning of every disciplinary action and lawsuit by detailing the course of events and the cause in detail?
“You did save the patient. In the end, anyway. But the process… you know, right? This isn’t just a matter of ignoring procedure; it’s a massive incident that could turn the whole hospital upside down. Trauma surgery Professor Kang Hyeon-jun seems inclined to let it go, but the hospital ethics committee and legal team won’t see it that way.”
Each explanation pierced my chest like a dagger.
“First, write down exactly why you made that decision today and what the situation was, from start to finish. No excuses—just the facts. Cover the five Ws and one H.”
She stood up from her seat.
“Have it written and submitted to me by tomorrow morning. Got it?”
Park Se-young finished speaking, drew the curtain, and left.
I was left alone on the empty bed, blankly staring at the fluorescent light on the ceiling.
***
As I sat there dazed, murmuring voices began to drift in from beyond the thin curtain.
Anonymous voices, whether they belonged to a nurse, a medical technologist, or just registration staff, I couldn’t tell.
“Hey, did you hear? There was a huge commotion in the resuscitation room earlier.”
“What happened?”
“They cut him open.”
“Cut what?”
“They cut open his belly! The patient’s belly!”
“What? They cut open the belly? But why? Wasn’t he going into emergency surgery? From surgery?”
Yeah, that would be the sensible reaction.
But from the next exchange onward, the story started veering off in a crazy direction.
“No, I mean… it wasn’t surgery. It was an emergency medicine doctor who did it.”
“What?”
“And not in the operating room either—here, in this ER resuscitation room!”
“Whoa. Isn’t that insane?”
Shock seeped into the whispering voices.
I closed my eyes.
Please, stop there.
“But do you know who did it? That’s even more unbelievable.”
“Who was it?”
“A first-year resident! You know, the one who diagnosed a myocardial infarction from a sore throat complaint!”
“That guy? He cut him open? Why? Is he completely crazy? Did he flip out and try to kill the patient or something?”
That’s not it.
He was doing it to save him.
But my inner protest never reached them.
“But you know what’s even funnier? The patient survived! And very successfully, too!”
The murmuring reached a peak.
To those people, I was already something beyond the human category.
A genius and a lunatic.
While I was being forced to listen to my reputation swing in real time from hell to heaven, it happened.
Swish.
With a loud rustle, the curtain was yanked open roughly.
It was Yoo Seong-hoon, a fourth-year resident.
Yoo Seong-hoon dragged over a chair and plopped down beside my bed.
“…Your body.”
His first words were short.
“I’m fine.”
My answer was short too.
For a moment, we just looked at each other in silence.
Breaking the awkward silence, Yoo Seong-hoon spoke first.
“Hey… uh… you know….”
Yoo Seong-hoon rubbed the back of his neck, as if it were hard to start speaking.
“Yes, sir.”
“It’s nothing else.”
After taking a deep breath, he finally got to the point.
“Are you crazy?”
His voice was dead serious.
A hundred percent genuine confusion.
“No, seriously, were you just trying to commit social suicide? A laparotomy in the ER? Did you want to go down in history? Or were you just so fed up with everything that you decided to throw your life away?”
Yoo Seong-hoon kept talking as if he didn’t even expect an answer from me.
“And what was with that hand in the first place? I clearly remember that even around the middle of this year you couldn’t get a single IV line right and ended up turning a patient’s arm into a bruised mess. Don’t you remember I had to clean that up? And then you used that hand to hold a scalpel and cut open a person’s belly? In the middle of that chaos?”
“N-no, doctor, I, uh… that is…”
I tried to make up some excuse, but he had no intention of hearing me out.
“Do you even know what you did? Do you know how serious this situation is? Do you have even the slightest sense of it? Haa… forget it. Don’t say anything.”
Yoo Seong-hoon ran a hand through his hair as if he were about to tear it out, then finally said with a resigned expression,
“Anyway, the report is due by tomorrow morning.”
He looked at me again.
“Casual speech… huh… well, why the hell were you speaking casually?”
His expression was one of genuine incomprehension.
“Were you stressed out? Or did you watch too many medical dramas or something? Or… were you possessed by a ghost or what?”
The moment I heard that, I stopped breathing.
‘Oh, the last one was right.’
But then Yoo Seong-hoon shook his head, wearing an expression that said, ‘Ah, what am I even saying?’
“Anyway, the ethics committee or disciplinary committee or whatever-the-hell-it-is will be convened. No, I mean, it’s not confirmed, but it probably will be. Even if you saved the patient, the fact that you ignored procedure is undeniable. There’ll probably be a mountain of rules from training regulations and all sorts of crap to hit you with. Anyway, write the report properly.”
Soon after, he stood up from his seat.
“Get some rest. See you tomorrow morning.”
The curtain closed again.
***
I sat on the bed, laptop open, blankly staring at the empty Word file in front of me.
At the top of the screen, the three words “incident report” were stamped there like a death sentence on my medical career.
‘How am I supposed to write this…?’
What on earth was I supposed to say to make even a little sense of the insane thing I’d done yesterday?
I tore at my hair and came up with a few scenarios.
First. The option of honestly admitting I’d gone crazy.
‘At the time, Han Hyeon-jae’s mind was clouded by the patient’s critical condition, and having lost his reason, he forgot his duty as a doctor and impulsively…’
…Certified insane.
The moment I submitted that, I’d be branded as a “dangerous lunatic who couldn’t control his stress and cut open a patient’s belly” and immediately sent to the highest level of disciplinary committee review. If I was lucky, it’d be a suspension.
Second. The option of telling a historic lie that I was actually a hidden master.
‘I, Han Hyeon-jae, have always had a deep interest in emergency trauma care and have secretly honed my surgical skills, and I judged the situation at the time to be sufficiently controllable by my own abilities…’
…No senior in the world would like a junior spouting nonsense like, “I’m pretty damn good, and the patient looked like he was about to die, so I just did it.”
Not only would I be buried forever in the department, I’d spend my whole life being called “that crazy bastard.”
Third. The method of just giving up and writing it.
‘I, Han Hyeon-jae, burned with a hot sense of mission to save the patient before the dying flame of life and, without realizing it, received a divine revelation…’
…That would just send me straight to the psych ward. The ethics committee members would be looking at a psychiatric evaluation request, not an incident report.
“Haa… shit.”
I buried my head in the desk.
There was no answer.
No matter which path I chose, only hell lay before me.
At that moment, the one and only escape route in my head came to mind.
Those lunatics might know some outrageous workaround to get me out of this situation.
I logged into [Dead Medical Scientists Gallery], clutching at the last straw.
At the very top of the gallery’s popular-post list was a brand-new post that had just been uploaded.
Title : Telling the tale of how I borrowed a first-year resident’s body and did an emergency laparotomy today.txt
Author : Scalpel God
That bastard...!
…The guys around me at the time were all panicking and running around in circles. The ER environment was rough, but my hand doesn’t care about such minor variables. In the end, it was perfect damage control.
I scrolled down to the comments, trembling.
ㅇㅇ (210.94) : Wow, that’s insane. Possession was really a thing? This feels like a fantasy novel.
OperatingRoomGhost3 : So how’s the OR these days? Is it much different from back in the day? Did you find out what the latest version of the laparoscopic machine is?
HippocratesDescendant : What is it like to experience the flesh of the living once more in this world, great surgeon! Is the air different? The color of the lights?
In front of a matter that had my entire medical career on the line, those bastards were all happily chatting as if sharing reviews after a VR game.
HellJoseonSlave1 : Hey, you socially inept ghost bastard.
HellJoseonSlave1 : Because of you! Because of just you, my medical career is about to be ruined! I have to write an incident report, the disciplinary committee is going to be held, and you blatantly talked down to all the seniors! You get to have a blast swinging a knife and then run off, but all the fucking cleanup afterward is my problem, you bastard!!!!!
At my wail, Scalpel God sauntered in.
ㄴ Scalpel God : Why should I care?
…Why should I care?
ㄴ Scalpel God : So did the patient live?
The moment I saw that comment, I was at a loss for words.
Right, that’s the most important thing. What state is he in now?
I suppressed my rage and logged back into the hospital EMR system.
『TICU
(*Trauma Intensive Care Unit)
Admitted.』
I read through the trauma surgery operative note and progress note like a man possessed.
‘...Current patient vital signs are stable, and the prognosis is thought to be favorable...’
With a hollow laugh, I commented on the gallery again.
ㄴ HellJoseonSlave1 : Yeah, he lived, you bastard. He’s in TICU. Thanks to you, his prognosis is excellent.
To my profanity-laced report, Scalpel God left a short comment as if satisfied.
ㄴ Scalpel God : Then that’s fine hehe
Those two letters, “hehe,” nearly made me slam my fist into the table.
I barely held on to my sanity and got to the point.
ㄴ HellJoseonSlave1 : Give me some advice for the report, you bastard who caused this incident.
At my question, as if they’d been waiting for it, all kinds of ghosts rushed in and began offering their own advice.
HippocratesDescendant : Be honest! Tell them that the soul of a great ancient surgeon has possessed your body! Truth is the only key that will save you from danger!
…If I said that, I wouldn’t be saved from danger; I’d be admitted to the psych ward.
LatteWasBetterBackThen : I got dragged around a disciplinary committee a few times back in my day, and I know this well: just grit your teeth and endure. “I don’t remember,” “I was out of my mind,” “All I could think about was saving the patient.” Repeat those three lines like a parrot. Then they’ll get tired and lower the punishment on their own.
ㅇㅇ (118.235) : Hire a lawyer. That’s the fastest.
TruckHitGuy : I’ve been to the disciplinary committee, and before it starts, just slam your head hard into the desk once. Works great. You can get sympathy points.
Watching the parade of bullshit filling the screen, I fell into a deep funk.