The emergency medicine doctor checked the patient’s pupillary reflex and shouted to the nurse.
“Put a Foley in this patient!”
“Yes!”
Weeeee—!
Ambulances continued to follow in one after another, and the emergency room was running more busily than ever.
The sound of nurses calling the surgical departments, the sound of stretcher wheels rolling, the sound of medical equipment being moved, and so on.
Choi Moo-gyeol, who had changed into surgical scrubs and come back down before anyone noticed.
On the left chest name tag, it was written: Fellow Choi Moo-gyeol.
However, there was one thing about him that could not be seen in ordinary fellows.
He was still in a state with a blood-soaked bandage wrapped tightly around his head.
Everyone who saw him was startled and said a word to him.
“Gasp, sir, are you okay?”
“Is Dr. Choi all right?”
“Is your head okay? What happened?”
Choi Moo-gyeol, receiving the pouring attention of the people, answered briefly.
“Well, I was at the scene of the accident.”
One nurse, unable to hold back, spoke.
“Dr. Choi Moo-gyeol, wait a moment!”
“Nurse Joo Min-ji.”
“Sir, I’ll undo the bandage and redo it for you. I’ll disinfect it too. You couldn’t have disinfected it at the scene, right?”
“That can be done slowly. The patient’s surgery comes first—”
Choi Moo-gyeol was obsessively fixated on the patient’s surgery to a bizarre degree, and Joo Min-ji dissuaded him with a persuasive argument.
“Are you thinking of causing a contam in the operating room?”
Contam (contamination).
The act of contaminating the interior of a sterile operating room or its instruments.
Contam is the ultimate taboo for a doctor.
“Mm.”
Choi Moo-gyeol could no longer ignore Joo Min-ji’s words.
“I’ll change it for you quickly. That way, there won’t be any unnecessary adverse effects on your condition, and when you operate, your true skills will come out at one hundred percent.”
“……That’s true.”
Choi Moo-gyeol nodded quietly and agreed with Joo Min-ji’s words.
Snip snip—.
Joo Min-ji picked up a Lister scissor and began cutting the bandage soaked with blood.
A Lister scissor is also called a bandage scissor, and because the blade part is curved like a boomerang, there is no risk of cutting skin even when cutting things like bandages or clothes.
It is an essential scissor of the emergency room. It is also called a Lister for short.
“Oh my! Look at this, if you just left it like this and something went wrong, what were you going to do?”
“Oh my.”
Even another nurse passing by was startled enough to inadvertently see the inside of Choi Moo-gyeol’s bandage.
There were many wounds, and in some of the wounds, glass shards were embedded as they were.
“I should call the emergency medicine doctor—”
“Nurse Joo, just take them out.”
“Are you sure you’ll be okay?”
“Emergency patients keep pouring in, so I can’t take away manpower.”
“But you’re an emergency patient too, sir!”
“Quickly.”
“You haven’t even been anesthetized—are you okay? At least local anesthesia…….”
“I’m fine.”
“Oh dear…… Yes, understood.”
She applied disinfectant and pulled out the glass shards one by one with tweezers.
The wounds would certainly sting, but there was no change in Choi Moo-gyeol’s expression.
‘If it were me, I would have been rolling around in pain. He’s definitely not an ordinary person…….’
He absentmindedly urged her.
“Pull them out a bit faster.”
“I’m doing it as fast as I can. You know that there could be tiny glass shards not visible to the naked eye, so we need to do an ultrasound too…….”
“Additional tests can be done once the situation is under control.”
“Oh dear.”
Letting out deep sighs, Joo Min-ji did her best to remove even the glass shards that were not easily visible.
Once the glittering glass shards had been removed to the point where they were no longer visible, Joo Min-ji brought saline solution and washed the wounds.
After washing away the foreign substances and blood, the wounds were quite gaping.
“Sir?”
“Yes?”
“They’ll probably need to be sutured…….”
“Skip the suturing, just dress it and wrap a bandage. I’ll do it later.”
“Understood. Who could stop you, sir.”
Joo Min-ji carefully finished so the bandage would not come loose.
Choi Moo-gyeol got up to examine the patients who had hurriedly come in.
A new nurse, watching his receding figure, whispered to Joo Min-ji.
“Dr. Choi Moo-gyeol must really love his patients.”
“You haven’t been here long, so you don’t know Dr. Choi well. It’s not like that.”
“What? It’s not like that, and yet he goes that far?”
“Of course, he’s a good doctor when it comes to practicing medicine. But he’s not the type who loves patients.”
“Then is he truly devoted to a sense of mission toward the work of being a doctor?”
“Who knows.”
“It’s not even a sense of mission?”
Seeing the new nurse make a bewildered expression, Joo Min-ji let out a chuckle.
“Dr. Choi is, how should I put it…… a person who is crazy about surgery. You could call him a surgery otaku.”
“A surgery otaku?”
“He’s a doctor who likes opening up patients’ skulls to an insane degree.”
“What? Isn’t that completely a psycho character from a horror movie?”
“That’s different again…… You’ll find out as you watch him more. What kind of person he is.”
“Hm?”
* * *
“Aigoo—! Aigoo! What on earth happened!”
“My child was in a traffic accident! Where is she now?”
“Are you a guardian? First, please calm down, and I’ll guide you.”
One by one, the families of patients who had received word of the accident began appearing in the emergency room.
With the noise of the medical staff trying to save people plus the noise of the patients’ families, the emergency room became even more chaotic.
The residents and the emergency medicine doctors were calmly tending to patients even in such a hubbub.
The emergency medicine doctor attached himself to serious patients, and the resident took patients whose conditions were, relatively speaking, less serious. The resident said to a patient.
“It’s truly a relief that it’s only this much.”
“Mm, a relief……?”
The patient, whose side of the head was greatly torn, asked back. It seemed they had violently hit their head against the car window at the moment of the accident.
“To end up with only this degree of trauma in such a large accident, you should call it good fortune.”
“I suppose so…….”
The resident, doing his best in his own way to reassure the patient’s heart, instructed the intern.
“First, let’s suture the laceration.”
“Yes.”
At that moment.
Choi Moo-gyeol, passing by, glanced at that patient.
He paused.
He had just discovered something not ordinary in the patient.
“Wait a moment. Now is not the time to leisurely do needlework.”
Choi Moo-gyeol stopped the resident.
“Dr. Choi? The patient’s wound is gaping open……?”
“This patient is very urgent.”
“Urgent?”
“Excuse me for a moment.”
“Yes?”
Choi Moo-gyeol took a penlight from the resident’s upper pocket. As if it were his own.
Then, with his other hand, he grasped the patient’s eyelid and shone the pupil. One side at a time.
“Can you see this?”
“What is it that you mean…….”
“The light reflex. The right pupil’s light reflex is noticeably slower than the left.”
“Huh? It really is?”
Choi Moo-gyeol asked the patient.
“Are you sleepy right now?”
“Uh…… yes, a little…….”
“Try clenching your left hand tightly.”
The patient wore an expression suggesting strength would not go into the left hand well.
“Is that all the strength you can give?”
“Strangely, I can’t grip with strength like usual.”
“Could it be that this isn’t a simple trauma…….”
Once the situation reached that point, the resident also felt something. This was not a simple trauma patient.
In that moment of realization.
“Huh…… huh…… I can’t…… breathe…… well…… huh…….”
The patient suddenly began experiencing difficulty breathing.
“Huh? P-patient?”
“…….”
“Ms. Park Sang-mi?”
The patient showed symptoms of even consciousness becoming cloudy.
“What did I tell you!”
“Ah…….”
Choi Moo-gyeol, having thus cast a ‘told you so’ at the resident, moved his body immediately without a moment’s delay.
Quickly picking up the Ambu bag placed on the emergency room tray, he shouted as he approached the patient.
“Quickly prepare for an intubation!”
“Ah, yes!”
It was an emergency situation occurring inside the emergency room. Choi Moo-gyeol was a neurosurgeon, not an emergency surgeon, but in a situation like this where the patient was on the verge of losing their breath, there was no time to quibble over affiliation.
Choi Moo-gyeol, inserting the laryngoscope obliquely into the patient’s mouth.
In the meantime, the resident, having received the stylet and ET tube, secured the patient’s airway above the laryngoscope and pushed the tube in.
Swoosh—.
He, too, as befitting a person with three years of work experience, assisted Choi Moo-gyeol with a practiced skill.
“Whew…….”
After oxygen supply to the patient was secured, when the resident let out a sigh of relief.
Choi Moo-gyeol suddenly picked up a medical stapler and, without hesitation, brought it to the side of the patient’s head.
“Whoa…….”
The emergency medicine intern, watching Choi Moo-gyeol from the side, inadvertently let out a groan.
Click— snap.
Click— snap.
Click— snap.
Choi Moo-gyeol had boldly sutured the scalp on the side of the patient’s head with the stapler.
Only then did he open his mouth.
“Now you understand why I said it wasn’t the time to suture the torn head earlier, right?”
The resident nodded.
“Because the patient has a hemorrhage that has burst inside their head.”
“That’s right. For now, we’ve gotten them through breathing like this, so take them for a CT immediately. If it’s because of the accident, it will be an EDH or an SAH, and if that’s not the cause, it could also be an ICH.”
EDH refers to epidural hematoma, SAH refers to traumatic subarachnoid hemorrhage, and ICH refers to intracerebral hemorrhage.
These are several types of bleeding that can occur inside a person’s head.
“Hey, intern! Let’s CT this patient right away. Without contrast, immediately!”
“Yes, sir!”
While the intern prepared the patient’s CT.
The resident asked Choi Moo-gyeol, who was about to move on to another patient.
“How did you know?”
“Pardon?”
“You grasped it at once. That there was a hemorrhage inside the head.”
“Ah, that?”
“Yes.”
“There’s no particular grand reason. The patient’s eyelids were drooping. Just as if they had ptosis.”
Sudden drooping of the eyelids can be a signal pointing to a cerebral hemorrhage. But could one distinguish that in a brief moment? The resident was inwardly a little surprised.
“You knew just by a single quick glance?”
“If both eyes had been like that, I wouldn’t have known. Ah, I would have passed it off thinking, so this patient’s eyelids are just naturally shaped like that. But only one eyelid was particularly drooping. I judged that there must definitely be something wrong inside the brain.”
“To notice even such a small signal in this chaos…….”
“Patients with intracerebral hemorrhage like this are not something you see just one or two days when you’re in neurosurgery.”
The resident said with a grin.
“Anyway, thank you. If it weren’t for you, Dr. Choi, I would have nearly put the patient in danger.”
“The blood that comes out from outside the body is easy to see, but the blood that comes out from inside is always hard to see. That’s the constant problem.”
“That’s right. When the patient comes out after the CT, I’ll leave the treatment in your hands.”
“I’ll do my best.”
Choi Moo-gyeol answered in his characteristic indifferent tone.
