I watched hopelessly as Joy tried to stop the opening of where the blood was expelling from. "The patient is suddenly bleeding profusely." Joy calmly reported, "Where is it bleeding from?" I asked with sweat building up inside my gloves. "There's so much blood, I can't see clearly."

"The bp is dropping." One of the surgical technicians informed as the bp monitor beeped twice. How come?? What explanation can be given for this sudden obstacle?

"What now?" I asked without taking my eyes off of the bleeding artery.

"I'll take over. Give me two thick ers and turn the suction to max." Joy demanded. What a bold move that was. Sure she seems confident now, but I know how all of this would go down. I can't believe this is actually happening... we're taking the surgery upon ourselves. All I could do now was to stay calm and be of some use in this situation. This is what all surgeons must be able to do... to just stay calm...

"Give her blood right away," I demanded. One bag of blood was hooked on the blood transfusion machine by the nurses.

"Give me another microscope." One came down immediately. It positioned itself in front of me as I narrowed my eyes through the eyepiece. The blurry view of the artery turned vivid as I blinked my eyes a couple of times. Come on Yeri, think of what Wendy taught you the other day... I knew something about this. My mind began recalling everything that I've learnt so far, gathering my medical knowledge into one place hoping that another Eureka moment would hit me. I whispered to myself as if I was solving equations.

-

No, it couldn't be... Heck, I might have figured out what this was.

"Joy, it looks to me that the patient has an Aortic Vascular Aneurysm too," I told her confidently. Joy gaped at me with her eyebrows furrowing, "What? But we didn't see it during the checkup before." She panicked while focusing on restoring more blood to the patient. "This kind of tumour won't show up in the CT or MRI scans. You'll need an Angioscope to detect it... However it seemed we skipped that because we found no need for it at the time." Joy's eyes were shooting around the place, improvising on what could be done to ease the situation, "How many bags of blood left?" She asked, "Only one and the bp is still dropping" They replied.

Since Dr Irene wasn't here, it meant that our positions automatically moved up a notch. Joy is now the AC with me being the 1st assistant. We never knew that this would happen. Even though I'm not familiar with this position, I'll try my best although it seemed impossible. We were in the heat of the moment. I glanced up at the timer, it was nearing zero...

This was bad, Amber's pulse is getting faster and faster. The bp is already unstable. If she keeps going like this, she'll die from excessive bleeding. "Start the second timer." Joy ordered. My mouth dropped in awe at her decision. Agony invaded my body from head to toe. Wait, is she really going to try and remove the Aortic Vascular Aneurysm too?! I don't know if she'd ever learnt how to perform surgeries of this kind yet. It was risky, but she was our best bet. It was better than doing what we're doing right now.

"Joy, are you really going to go through with this?" She nodded in complete focus. I wanted to stop her. Right now I didn't know what she was doing, but she was doing something. I didn't want her to face any consequences if anything went wrong, so I fibbed, "Dr Irene is coming. We should wait." She ignored me as I watched hesitantly. She was in her own world. She has transcended into overconfidence at this stage that I don't think she heard me. "We mustn't do anything without Dr Irene's permission."

"Yeri, a life is at stake. We don't have time." She retorted quickly, "We've never performed this kind of surgery before." I continued assuming that she hasn't.

What am I supposed to do?? Argue with her?? As if. I know that the people around us were not supposed to interrupt or intervene us 'surgeons' in the middle of surgeries because usually, we would do all the talking but really just this once, I wanted someone to speak up, but they all remained silent. We weren't perfectionists! We needed as