Cutting and Stitching (1)

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Steroids.

Not the anabolic steroids that the masses know for pumping up muscles.

In medicine, corticosteroids that calm inflammation are called cortisone,

and, along with antibiotics and aspirin, it's one of internal medicine's holy trinity.

To exaggerate a little, they say that if you carry only those three drugs, an internist can work miracles anywhere.

That wasn't even entirely false in practice.

Whenever I went overseas for volunteer work during school breaks, I always made sure to pack those three essentials. (Of course, I was a surgeon, not an internist.)

The reason I still hadn't been able to make cortisone, unlike the first two drugs, was simple.

'I thought I could just extract it from the adrenal glands...!'...