Chapter 64
At Minjae's words, the child's father fell silent for a moment.
“Y-you bastard...!”
The moment he spat out another curse and tried to lunge at Minjae.
“Sir.”
The police officers blocking him on both sides stopped his movement.
“Unless you'd like to add an assault charge, come with us.”
And just like that, the filthy commotion came to an end.
“You quack bastards! Do you know who I am?! I won't let any of you off! I'll make you regret this for the rest of your lives!”
That ugly display looked like a spectacle to everyone in the emergency room.
In the end, the parents were led out through the ER's automatic doors by the police officers.
And then Minjae did something very strange.
Minjae followed them all the way to the ER entrance and waved elegantly and crisply, like a ground crew member waving off a departing plane.
It was a satisfyingly slick taunt.
That crazy bastard...
He's not just crazy.
He's a high-class lunatic.
I told you that guy gave off a bad vibe.
While the two men, furious and getting more and more agitated, kept seething, Minjae just smiled and waved.
That bastard is really insane.
Then the police car drove off again and the ER's automatic doors closed.
As if nothing had happened, the ER returned to its usual state.
But I still couldn't pull myself out of the memory from earlier.
My brain felt a little overloaded, if anything.
It started overloading the moment I witnessed child abuse, then again when the parents started acting like absolute lunatics, and by the time Minjae unleashed an even crazier bout of madness, my brain had completely stopped functioning.
Just as I was spacing out with a half-dazed expression.
Right then, a familiar shadow approached from beside me.
Minjae.
Our ER's maniac.
Minjae, seeing me stare vacantly into space, tossed out a line.
“What are you doing? We need to get back to work.”
With that one line, my brain's power switch flipped back on.
“A-ah, y-yes, sir!!!”
I hurriedly came to my senses and headed for the station.
As soon as we reached the station, one nurse ran toward us.
“Doctor! Even after giving the C-3 bed patient a fever reducer, the fever won't drop below 39. What should we do?”
Ah.
This damn pediatric ER shift.
Should I say it's good that the work never stops, or bad?
***
I was wedged into a corner of the station, staring blankly at the blinking cursor on the monitor.
Had about ten minutes passed like that?
Thud.
A cold can of coffee was casually set down on my desk.
When I looked up, Minjae was standing askew with his hands shoved in his pockets, looking down at me.
“Ah, thank you.”
“Thankful for what? I'm just giving you the one I couldn't give you earlier.”
Ah, the very same can of coffee that had been thrown to the floor.
Looks like he'd remembered and bought it again.
“Haha, still, thanks. I'll enjoy it.”
“Hm.”
Minjae pulled the chair beside me over and flopped down.
“Did that child-abuse case get up to the ward all right? Check the EMR.”
“Ah, yes. Just a moment.”
I moved the mouse and brought up the screen.
Beside the child's name, a new location was now listed instead of the pediatric ER.
“Yes, they've been safely admitted to Ward 72 of the Children's Hospital.”
“Mm, okay. Good.”
Minjae nodded as if satisfied.
Minjae leaned back deeply in his chair and stretched both arms over his head.
“By the way.”
“Yes.”
“Was I kind of cool just now?”
…Huh?
I couldn't believe my ears.
What did he just say?
“No, I mean, wasn't I pretty cool? Standing right in front of that bastard of a father and blocking him? Huh? That was sick, right? Right? Almost like a movie protagonist. K...”
What was I supposed to say?
Yes, sir, you were like a champion of justice?
Or, honestly, was it embarrassing because you seemed a bit over the top?
The first is flattery, and the second is suicide.
I came up with the safest and most efficient answer I'd learned during a year of slave labor.
“Yes. You were kind of cool.”
Kind of.
I stressed the word 'kind of' as much as possible.
My last shred of pride.
But Minjae seemed to have filtered out that little word 'kind of' completely.
“Haha! Right? I knew it! The moment I shoved that screen in that bastard's face and asked him if he knew what it was! Wasn't it practically a noir-film highlight scene? Something like, 'Might as well smoke one cigarette before you go,' right? Isn't that it?”
“That's completely different, sir.”
I swallowed the words I couldn't bring myself to say aloud along with a mouthful of canned coffee.
Minjae spent a long while admiring his own heroic performance, analyzing it, and getting drunk on his own ego.
I just nodded with dead eyes, occasionally
“Ah...”
“Yes...”
“Amazing...” and the like.
Maybe this hospital was actually one huge kindergarten.
And I was the nanny in that kindergarten, placating the most difficult kid.
No matter how I looked at it, this place didn't feel like a facility belonging to a university, an institution of higher learning.
Is it just my imagination?
***
A peaceful 6 a.m.
It was when the end of the hellish night shift finally started to come into view.
The children's cries that had echoed through the night had quieted, and the nurses at the station, with dazed expressions, were nodding off, unable to fight off the drowsiness.
I, too, sat in my chair like an empty shell, staring meaninglessly at the screensaver on the monitor.
Hm, maybe I should think about the history of screensavers.
Were there screensavers in the 1990s, or not?
How do screensavers differ by operating system?
Just then, the ER's automatic doors quietly opened.
And a youthful-looking boy, looking on the verge of tears, carefully hugged his left arm with his right and shuffled in.
“Um... excuse me...”
At that tiny voice, the nurse dozing at the desk startled awake and looked up.
I forced my heavy body upright and went over to the student.
“...Student? What's hurting, and how did it happen? How did you get here?”
My voice was thick with sleep.
“At home...”
“At home?”
“I was watching anime and waving a cheering stick...”
…
“Huh?”
“All of a sudden there was a pop in my shoulder and my arm won't move...”
I was briefly speechless.
Anime.
Cheering stick.
Shoulder.
So he watched anime and waved a cheering stick.
Okay, I can understand that. I have a few friends like that, too.
I was in the anime club myself.
But what? His shoulder came out?
I checked the student's name in the EMR and simply gave a few instructions.
“...Mm, Jin Sehyun. For now, sit on that bed over there. And when I call your name, go to the imaging room over there. I think we'll have to take an X-ray to know for sure.”
I led the student to an empty bed.
Just then, Minjae, who happened to be passing by nearby, didn't miss this interesting case and came over.
“What's going on?”
“Ah, he's a 14-year-old student. He was watching anime at home and waving a cheering stick, and I think he dislocated his shoulder.”
At my explanation, Minjae's face twisted into a dumbfounded expression, as if to say, 'What on earth is this?'
A little while later, the X-ray came up.
On the screen, a textbook anterior dislocation was clearly visible, with the head of the humerus popped down out of the round socket of the scapula.
“Mm, yep. It's a dislocation.”
Minjae said.
“Reduction
(* reduction)
We should do it, right?”
“We should. Try it yourself. Even as a first-year, you need lots of practice with these to get good at them.”
And so the night's final task... though I wasn't sure whether it really was the final one—was handed to me anyway. I took the student to the treatment room. The student kept staring only at my hands with terror in his eyes the entire time he sat on the bed.
“All right, student. From now on I'm going to put your shoulder back in place. It might hurt a little, but if you tense up it'll hurt even more, so try to relax as much as possible, okay?”
“Yes... yes...”
I carefully took hold of the student's left arm.
And for the first step of the reduction, I tried to rotate the arm just a tiny bit outward.
Right then.
“Aaaaaaaa! Seriously! It really hurts! Wait, seriously!”
I let go.
“Student?”
“Yes...”
“I haven't even touched anything yet?”
“Ah... okay. I'll really do it.”
“All right, I'll give you a shot first to loosen the muscles. That'll hurt less.”
I picked up the syringe with painkillers and a sedative in it.
And wiped his forearm with an alcohol swab.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaa! It stings! Wait! It hurts!”
“…….”
I looked at the student with the syringe in my hand.
“Student. I haven't even put the needle in yet.”
After a bit of struggling, I finally succeeded in giving the injection.
And so I waited for the muscles to relax enough.
After enough time had passed, I took the student's arm again.
This time, Minjae held the opposite shoulder from the side.
“All right, student. Take a deep breath. One, two, three!”
The moment I slowly rotated the arm outward and lifted it up.
Pop-
A dull but satisfying sound rang out.
A short groan burst from the student's mouth.
The pleasant sound of the bone slipping back into place.
I carefully moved the student's arm.
It moved smoothly, unlike before.
“Uh... huh? It doesn't hurt!”
Color flushed back into the face of the student who'd been screaming that he was going to die just moments before.
“All right, now keep the sling on, and for the next few days don't move it too much, okay? And from now on, don't cheer so aggressively.”
Yeah, that's the age when you're at your most fired up.
I patted the student's shoulder and sent him on his way.
“Be careful from now on.”
And so, the long, long night shift finally came to an end.