Kwon Shiyeon’s uterine muscle layer is a dark bluish-grey, full of infiltrated blood. It’s a bad sign, and Jongdae’s heart sinks to see it. He makes his second cut and immediately blood spills over his hands, far more than there should be. The uterus is filled with blood that is escaping in any way it can, flooding from the as well as from the surgical wound, so much that he can hear it pouring like a waterfall through a tube and into the large plastic collection receptacle on the floor.

“Suction,” he says. Two surgery assistants place their tubes, but it’s like trying to bail out a sinking boat with a couple of straws. His hands are submerged in hot, dark blood as he gets his hands around the foetus. He lifts it out in both hands, raining blood, and an assistant clamps the umbilical cord just as the mother’s vital signs crash. Jongdae hands the premature infant to the waiting neonatologist without turning away from the mother. He doesn’t know if the baby is alive, but that’s not his problem anymore. He needs to remove Shiyeon’s torn uterus to stop the bleeding. She’d been hemorrhaging on arrival to the ED, and rapid ultrasonography had shown that the placenta had torn away from the uterus, causing massive bleeding from all the blood vessels that supplied the growing foetus.

“I can’t see!” he snaps at the assistants with their suction tubes, but they can’t do more than they’re already doing. Again he plunges both hands into the pool of blood in her abdomen, feeling blindly for the bleeding vessels he needs to tie off. Shiyeon is still in cardiac arrest and three theatre staff are rotating on chest compressions, but Jongdae has already felt the difference in her blood pressure against his hands, and he doesn’t need the monitors to tell him that her heart is no longer pumping. She’d already lost far too much blood when she arrived at the emergency department, and the transfusions hadn’t had a chance of catching up.

He keeps working on removing the torn uterus while the interns continue to resuscitate, until after many long minutes have passed, the anaesthesiologist quietly prompts him. “Dr. Kim?”

Jongdae knows what she’s getting at. He’s working uselessly now. He needs to stop. He should have stepped back minutes ago, should have let them stop the exhausting task of performing chest compressions. He’s in charge here, and being in denial over the fact that he’s lost another patient is helping nobody.

He takes his hands out of Shiyeon’s abdomen.

“Stop,” he says, and closes his eyes. In the sudden quiet he hears the drops of blood falling from his fingers and onto the floor acutely.

“I’m ready to call the code. Any objections?” The words are routine, not even really a question. Nobody is going to object to this code, and the silence confirms it. He goes through the motions of checking for pupillary response and carotid pulse, then looks at the room clock. “Time of death, 14:03.”

He steps back from the table and lets Shin Nara, the third-year resident assisting him, take over to close up the body. He keeps walking slowly backwards until he comes up against the wall and watches numbly as the interns start to clear up. He’ll have to go and talk to Shiyeon’s husband soon, but he just can’t face it yet.

He lets his head fall back against the wall with a quiet thump. His fists clench and unclench by his sides. He can feel the slipperiness of her blood on his gloves, going slightly tacky as it dries. He replays his actions. Was there something he could have done differently, some way he might have saved her? He doesn’t think so. Like Lee Rijin the other week, this death wasn’t due to any error of his. He didn't lose control of her case - he never had control in the first place. He never had a chance.

This isn’t supposed to happen to him. He became an obstetrician for the joy of bringing new life into the world. He’s not supposed to feel it slip away beneath his hands.

There’s a dull thump, and someone swears. He glances towards the sound to see that one of the interns has knocked over the receptacle that was catching the l hemorrhage, and several liters of blood is spreading across the operating room floor. The interns jump back from the sudden flood. Nara, still closing up at the table, gives an irritated sigh, but doesn’t move from her position as the spill laps against her plastic shoe-covers. Jongdae’s jaw clenches. They shouldn't be so careless.

“What is this, the biblical flood?” one of the interns jokes.

“Build me an ark,” another intones, and they both snort with laughter.

Something inside Jongdae snaps. He pushes away from the wall and grabs both interns by their shoulders, shoving them backwards towards the door.

“That is completely inappropriate,” he says furiously. “A person has just died!” The interns come up against the closed OR door and one of their elbows knocks the opening button. The door swings open and he shoves them out into the hall. A couple of orderlies arriving to clean the OR freeze in place, but Jongdae ignores them. Emotions he's not calm enough to identify crash around inside him, and he yells his anger and frustration at the interns until the girl is cringing, the boy is visibly holding back tears, and Jongdae’s voice is starting to shake. He turns away and manages to stop yelling long enough to take in a deep breath and slowly let it out. There’s a ringing silence. When he turns back to the interns, they both flinch.

“Go,” he says wearily. “Get out of my sight.”

They flee down the hallway, and it's only then Jongdae realizes that he has an audience. The orderlies had crept inside the OR during his tirade, but his yells must have attracted the attention of all the nearby nurses and residents. They’re standing against the walls, holding their various clipboards and equipment, and they’re all staring. Jongdae’s anger has all been shouted out, leaving him feeling incredibly tired.

“Don’t you all have anything better to do?” he asks, and stands limply in the corridor while they disappear in all directions. Thank goodness there’s a long stretch of corridor and a set of closed doors between himself and the family waiting area. It wouldn't be good for the public to see a surgeon lose his cool like that.

He needs to clean himself up. Numbly, he goes into the scrubbing area and washes, throws his blood-soaked garments away, and changes into fresh scrubs. He survives the meeting with Shiyeon’s husband and the rest of his on-call shift. He doesn’t allow himself to think until his shift ends at 7 pm.

Usually he looks forward to seeing Ahreum and the kids at the end of the day and tries to get home in time to at least kiss his children goodnight before they fall asleep, but tonight he doesn’t feel confident in his ability to summon the smiling face he always wants to show them. He has to get his head together before he faces his family, and there’s something he needs to do. He messages Ahreum that he’ll be late and heads towards the NICU. He fears the worst, but if he wants to have a hope of sleeping tonight, he needs to find out what happened to Kwon Shiyeon’s baby.

As the elevator rises towards the NICU floor, he closes his eyes, recalling how he’d yelled at the interns. He sighs. With the clarity of hindsight, he knows he reacted disproportionately. He was upset about losing another patient, but it wasn’t right to take out his frustration on the interns, even if they were insensitive. Jongdae can’t even remember the last time he lost his temper so badly. Then again, in his specialty, he very rarely loses patients, and he’s never been put to the test of losing two in such quick succession.

It’s after visiting hours, so the floor is very quiet. Through the glass walls, the lighting in the NICU is dim. There are two nurses working at the computers behind the reception desk. One of them glances up at the sound of his approaching footsteps. His eyes flick to Jongdae’s chest, reading the ID badge clipped to the pocket of his white coat.

“Dr. Kim, good evening. What brings you here?”

Jongdae attempts a smile. “I just wanted to check on a baby I delivered earlier by emergency C-section.”

“I’ve just come on shift. I’ll need to look up our admissions from today. Has the child been named?”

“Not that I’m aware of. The family name is Kwon. The parents are Jinyoung and Shiyeon.”

The nurse types the names into his computer while Jongdae waits, trying to mentally prepare himself to hear the news he dreads.

“Ah, here we are,” the nurse reads out the details. “Male baby “Kwon” was admitted at 1340. He is stable and breathing independently.” The nurse looks up and smiles. “Sounds like you delivered a young fighter, Dr. Kim.”

Jongdae lets out a shaky breath and hurriedly turns away to hide his emotions. He hadn’t completely realised how much he’d been dreading bad news, and the relief is incredible. He feels like a hand had been clenched around his heart all day, and now it’s just let go.

When he’s controlled his expression, he turns back to the nurse. “Alright if I go in?”

“Go ahead,” the nurse nods at the glass doors. “He’s in incubator 6. Oh, make sure the intern on observation duty is still awake while you’re in there. Her name is Lee Kyungri. I swear, if I didn’t know she was an intern, I’d think she had narcolepsy.”

Jongdae laughs. “Sounds about right.”

He sanitises his hands and the glass automatic doors slide open. He steps into the warm dimness of the NICU, where rows of clear plastic incubators sustain tiny, precious lives. The infants are attached to various monitors and IV lines, and most of them are on bubble CPAP oxygen therapy to assist lungs not yet developed enough to breathe easily on their own. Jongdae glances around and spots the intern in a rocking chair in the corner of the room, where parents can sit to hold their babies if they're stable enough to be held. Her head has fallen back, is hanging open, and she’s snoring. Jongdae can’t help grinning. He’ll wake the intern up before he goes, but he might as well let her sleep a bit longer while he’s here. He doesn’t blame her for falling asleep. It’s so warm and quiet in here that it would be almost impossible not to, and the monitors will sound a loud alert if any of the infants stops breathing.

He finds incubator 6 and looks down at the baby boy sleeping inside it. He’s big for 30 weeks, probably close to 2 kilograms in weight, and as the nurse had mentioned, he’s not on bubble CPAP, already breathing well unaided. He’s wearing nothing but a diaper and a tiny red knitted hat. Jongdae watches the baby’s chest rise and fall beneath the pads of his heart rate monitor. As he watches, the baby moves his right arm a little and opens a pair of large, black eyes. He’s far too young to focus yet, but Jongdae finds himself smiling down at him anyway. He puts his hand into the incubator and the baby’s palm with his index finger and is startled to feel the tiny fingers curl slightly. The grasp reflex doesn’t usually develop for another 2 weeks.

“You are a fighter, aren’t you?” he murmurs softly. “That’s good. You need to be.” His smile dims, thinking of Shiyeon, who never got to see her child, and this little boy, who will grow up without a mother.

“Hi,” a quiet voice says, and he glances to his right. The intern - Lee Kyungri, he recalls her name - has woken up and has come to stand beside him. She looks at him with a question in her eyes.

“I’m an obstetrician,” Jongdae explains. “I delivered this boy earlier.”

“Oh,” Kyungri’s face lightens and she beams at him. “You’re Dr. Kim! I was hoping I’d get to meet you.”

“Me?” Jongdae is puzzled. “Why?”

“This wee boy’s father was here this afternoon,” Kyungri tells him. “He told me that without you, he would have lost his son as well as his wife. He said he was too shocked to acknowledge you earlier, but he wanted me to thank you for him. I was going to email you, but I’m glad I got to tell you in person.”

Jongdae is both surprised and touched. He wouldn’t have blamed Kwon Jinyoung if the man had hated him forever for not saving his wife. He would never have dreamed of receiving thanks instead.

“He asked me your name, so I got it off the chart for him,” Kyungri continues. “And look, Dr. Kim!”

Jongdae leans forward to look where she’s pointing. There’s a detachable paper name slip on the front end of the incubator, and it’s been filled in with firm black characters. “Baby Kwon” has been given a name.

Kwon Jongdae.

---

Kyungsoo stares at the reminder email he has just received. It’s a mismatch of clip-art balloons and a cursive font from the 90’s, and it looks atrocious. INVITATION, it says in big bold letters at the top in an ugly pink. It elaborates with High School Reunion in an even uglier green. Kyungsoo closes the email hurriedly. It’s hurting his eyes to look at it. He selects the little checkbox next to the email and drifts his cursor to the trash can icon. He hovers over it longingly. It’s tempting. It’s very, very tempting. But he can’t quite bring himself to do it. Deleting the invitation would be immature, and wouldn’t solve his problem.

The reunion is this Saturday, and Kyungsoo needs to find a good reason not to go. He isn’t on call, he doesn’t have prior commitments - he doesn’t even have to visit his parents, which these days may actually be worse than the reunion. He could ask Dr Hwang to switch shifts with him, but trying to explain that he really, really wants to work instead of going to a “fun” high school reunion is going to get him more questions from his nosy colleague than he wants to deal with. It might be less stressful to just go to the reunion and escape after an hour or two.

He’s interrupted from