Chapter 67
A few months ago, I was still a bumbling intern who was more used to being called a student than a doctor.
And that day too, I was spending a peaceful shift doing all sorts of odd jobs in the ER.
By “peaceful,” I mean the passive kind of peace that comes from not being the one responsible for deciding whether a patient lives or dies.
That's just what interns do.
Sprinting to the lab with an ABGA sample at 3 a.m. while the pneumatic tube system was under maintenance.
Processing dozens of backed-up EKG printouts at 7 a.m.
Transporting a patient who needed a CT to radiology on a rattling stretcher, then going back an hour later to pick them up again.
And answering the phone nonstop to pass along messages.
That was an intern's daily life.
Of all of it, blood draws were by far the worst.
“Ow!”
The needle in my hand missed the old woman's thin, fragile vein again.
It was already my fifth attempt.
The emaciated old woman's arm was covered in deep blue bruises, like proof of my incompetence.
“Doctor... do we really have to draw blood...? My mother is hurting....”
In the end, a nurse who had been watching this scene walked over to me with a deep sigh.
“Intern, step aside for a moment.”
The charge nurse retied the tourniquet.
And without a single moment's hesitation, she found the vein I had failed to locate.
Dark red blood slowly welled up inside the syringe.
I stood beside her, wishing I could hide in a mouse hole.
A person who poked patients' arms over and over for blood tests, ended up needing a nurse's help after all, and then got chewed out by a senior resident back at the station: “Do you even have hands?”
The ER I had imagined as a med student and the reality I faced as an intern were worlds apart.
The ER in dramas was always dramatic.
Every day, a patient whose heart had stopped would be rushed in, and a genius doctor would save them like a miracle.
I dreamed of being that hero.
But reality was different.
During that one month I spent rotating through the ER as an intern, dozens of cardiac arrest patients were brought into the resuscitation room.
We did chest compressions like mad, pumped in drugs, and defibrillated them.
But only one of them ever walked out of the ER alive.
Most cardiac arrest patients were already dead before they reached the hospital, or else they grew cold on the resuscitation bed despite all our efforts.
The ER was not a place where you only saw dying patients every day.
If anything, it was the opposite.
“I've been a little congested since yesterday—could you prescribe something for it?”
“I'm near the office. I've got a hangover headache, so could I get a vitamin IV?”
“I looked it up online and my symptoms are exactly like late-stage pancreatic cancer, so please do a CT and MRI right now.”
And the doctors in the ER were nothing like the heroes I had imagined.
They looked less like heroes and more like fighters, battling disease, trauma, and sometimes even patients and doctors from other departments.
They weren't the emergency physicians I had imagined.
They were just ordinary people struggling to save the one patient right in front of them, or to hand them off alive somewhere else.
A lot of the fantasies I had held onto during internship shattered.
Fantasies about the profession of being a doctor. Fantasies about the wonder of life.
And even fantasies about myself.
At first, I had wanted to go into emergency medicine.
As a student, I was obsessed with a medical drama that was hailed as an all-time classic.
The ER on screen was always tense, and the doctors were always heroes.
The protagonist never gave up on a patient, even in near-impossible situations, and saved lives like a miracle.
I saw the path I was meant to take in that drama.
That's what a real doctor is.
A person who protects a patient's life with their whole body on the front line between life and death.
That was it.
That was exactly the kind of doctor I wanted to become.
Yeah, maybe it really was because of that drama.
Which meant all of my fantasies came from that tightly written script and flashy directing.
“Baek Eunseo, are you crazy? The days when EM had good work-life balance are long gone. It has more downsides now.”
“With your personality, you'd last a month in the ER at best before running out. Fighting drunk patients every night, getting your collar grabbed by family members, and cleaning up after patients vomiting blood—that's not your dream, is it?”
Even with countless upperclassmen and classmates shouting warnings and pleas in college, I never wavered.
Those pieces of advice sounded to me like nothing more than excuses from losers in the face of my burning sense of purpose.
I actually looked down on them.
I told myself they lacked the passion to throw everything away and save patients the way the drama's protagonist did.
I had counted the days until I could finally go to the ER.
But once I became an intern and faced reality, it was even more horrifying than any hell I had imagined, and the gap hit me harder than anything else.
In the dramas, when a patient with a stopped heart was brought in, the protagonist would rush in and bring them back like a miracle.
But in the real ER, the first CPR I ever witnessed failed.
In the dramas, a rookie doctor would save a patient with groundbreaking diagnoses and procedures and get praised for it.
In reality, the first patient I ever did chest compressions on died right in front of me.
Hearing the professor's emotionless voice declare the death, I ran out into the hallway and collapsed, crying from helplessness.
I think I cried like that for a long time.
Emergency physicians fought disease and trauma.
And at the same time, they fought unreasonable patients, other departments that wouldn't hand over a bed, and the hospital's cost-cutting directives.
Their faces were filled with nothing but bitter cynicism, rather than a sense of duty.
That reality drove me farther away from emergency medicine than any warning from a senior or classmate ever could.
“Ah, this isn't it.”
By the time my internship was nearing its end, I finally realized.
The hero I had dreamed of doesn't exist in this hell.
No, such a person doesn't exist in the world at all.
I gave up on emergency medicine.
But I couldn't give up on the path of becoming a doctor.
“At the very least, let's go into another department that deals with life.”
If it wasn't this hellish frontline—if it were a more orderly, predictable environment—maybe I could get even a little closer to the doctor I had dreamed of becoming.
That felt like the last thing that could preserve the naive belief I still had left.
Of course, it wasn't that the people in the ER were bad.
Especially the first-year residents I crossed paths with most often were holding on in their own ways.
Senior Han Hyunjae and Senior Jo Suyeon were kind.
When I failed dozens of times at ABGA blood draws, Senior Han Hyunjae would come over without a trace of annoyance and, between seeing patients, calmly teach me how to angle the needle and how to feel for the artery's pulse.
Of course, they never actually demonstrated it for me.
Why was that, I wonder?
Senior Kim Jihoon just always seemed busy.
They were always either furiously typing at the station computer or on the phone.
And Senior Choi Minjun just seemed a little absent-minded.
They always walked down the hallway with a dazed look, and sometimes it seemed like they even forgot what order they'd just given.
Sorry, senior.
This is just my honest impression.
The first-year seniors were all good people.
But their worn-out looks struck me more as a warning.
That would be my face a year from now.
I never wanted to become like that.
Yeah, EM wasn't it.
I had made that firm vow on my last day in the ER.
The moment I walked out that door, I would never even look toward emergency medicine again.
And then, that day.
A trauma patient was brought in.
Without sirens, without warning.
A man with rebar lodged in his abdomen, bleeding as he collapsed to the floor.
Everyone was scrambling, and despair was written across every face.
His blood pressure had bottomed out, and his heart was about to stop.
I watched that scene while darting around in the corner of the resuscitation room.
“See? This is reality.”
I muttered to myself.
This is the true face of the ER.
There are no heroes from dramas.
Only ordinary people, helplessly collapsing before overwhelming death.
That was when it happened.
One person started moving.
First-year resident Han Hyunjae.
The voice, the gestures, everything changed.
“Scalpel.”
At that one word, everyone froze.
The seniors shouted that they were crazy.
They screamed that their license would be gone.
I saw it.
Senior Han's hand moved faster and more precisely than any surgeon I had ever seen during my rotations.
The entire process of pouring in Betadine and opening the sterile drapes felt like a work of art.
The scalpel in Senior Han's hand saved the life that was slipping away without the slightest hesitation.
In my eyes, only that one person existed.
A doctor with a scalpel, in the middle of blood and death, going beyond every rule and every common-sense limit with one single conviction: to save the patient.
Ah, so that's it.
My heart started beating again.
So this was the scene from that drama.
Of course, it looked different.
It wasn't noble like in a drama.
It was brutal.
But the essence was the same.
So this is emergency medicine.
Only then did I understand.
And so I steeled myself again.
Yeah.
I made up my mind.
To go into emergency medicine.
I don't know if I can become like that person.
I don't have the confidence to become that kind of monster.
But at the very least, I wanted to be a doctor who wouldn't run away in the middle of that battlefield.
That night, I gathered up the shattered pieces of my dream once again.