November 19th

Hospital 365
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It feels like forever since Jongdae’s had a chance to hang out with his two best friends. They usually meet for lunch in the staff cafeteria, but the past two weeks have been crazy and their schedules have slipped out of sync. Even on the rare occasions Jongdae had time to actually go to the cafeteria, he's only managed to meet Chanyeol twice in the past couple of weeks, and Baekhyun not at all.

Jongdae doesn’t mind busy schedules, but he misses his friends and the laughter they bring to his day, so when he manages to finish his morning rounds and outpatients on time for once he sends a message to the group chat. He gets an immediate enthusiastic response complete with excessive exclamation marks from Chanyeol, but only a read notification from Baekhyun. Jongdae heads up to the staff cafeteria anyway, trusting that Baekhyun will come if he can.

When the elevator doors open on his floor, Chanyeol’s inside, leaning against the back wall and smiling down at his phone with just about the sappiest expression Jongdae has ever seen. He steps in beside the tall paediatrician and grabs his wrist to try and get a look at the screen.

“What is it? Puppies?”

Chanyeol jerks his phone away, clutching it to his chest to hide the screen.

“What?” Jongdae teases. “Was it something naughty?”

“Jongdae!” Jongdae’s grin fades, replaced by confusion and slight alarm. Chanyeol sounds angry, looks angry too. “Don't do that, what the hell?”

Jongdae is really taken aback. They play around all the time, and Chanyeol never reacts like this. “I just - you were smiling so hard I thought you must be looking at something cute…” he trails off. “You're right, it was rude of me. Sorry.”

He glances anxiously up at Chanyeol. He’s never had to tiptoe around him before.

Chanyeol sticks his phone in his pocket and passes a hand over his face, shoulders slumping. “Crap, sorry. I didn't mean to bite your head off.”

“I didn’t see what it was, if that helps,” Jongdae offers. Chanyeol gives an awkward laugh.

“Just a silly message from a friend.” He wraps a friendly arm around Jongdae’s shoulders, giving him a quick reassuring squeeze. “Seriously, I was out of line reacting like that. Forget it, yeah?”

Jongdae gives his friend a relieved smile and pushes the incident out of his mind.

The elevator doors slide open and they head towards the cafeteria, their usual banter restored. Chanyeol tells him a couple of jokes his little patients have told him, which Jongdae stores up in his mind to repeat to Chorong. She’s just gotten into jokes, and even the dumbest ones have her falling to the floor in fits of giggles. It’s so cute that Jongdae always tries to bring one or two new ones home to tell her.

They grab food from the self-serve line and sit down, and Jongdae checks his phone again. Still nothing from Baekhyun.

“I haven’t seen Baekhyun for ages,” he says. Chanyeol nods, swallowing his first mouthful of japchae.

“Me either. Maybe his surgical schedule is full.”

“We should get together sometime soon, outside of work,” Jongdae suggests, but Chanyeol has stopped paying attention, his eyes focusing into the distance over Jongdae's shoulder. He raises a long arm and waves.

“Baekhyun, over here!” Chanyeol's deep voice cuts easily through the general noise and chatter. Jongdae looks around, spotting Baekhyun immedately as he weaves his way through the tables towards them. He’s about to smile in welcome, but finds himself frowning slightly instead as he takes in his friend's appearance. Is it just the light in here, or does Baekhyun look sick?

Baekhyun drops wearily into the third chair at their table and Jongdae eyes him as unobtrusively as he can. Baekhyun is pale, and his face is definitely thinner than the last time Jongdae saw him, making his eyes look hollow and shadowed. He smiles at them, but it takes such obvious effort that it makes Jongdae more worried, not less. It’s not Baekhyun’s usual smile. There’s no light in it.

“You made it!” Chanyeol reaches out to clap Baekhyun’s shoulder. “I was wondering if you’d disappeared off the face of the planet.”

Baekhyun shrugs. “It’s been a busy week,” he says. Even his voice is dull.

“Baekhyun, are you okay?” Jongdae asks.

Baekhyun glances at him.

“Of course,” he says. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

Jongdae hesitates. The way Baekhyun said it was almost challenging, and he doesn’t need a repeat of what happened with Chanyeol in the elevator.

Chaneyol slips into his hesitation. “You’re pretty pale,” he says. Jongdae feels a little relief that Chanyeol has seen something wrong too, it’s not just him. “Are you sick?”

“No," Baekhyun says. "I'm fine." He stabs his chopsticks into his noodles and lifts them towards his mouth, and Jongdae watches as a faint look of revulsion comes onto his face. He drops the noodles back into the bowl and takes a sip of water instead.

Jongdae exchanges a glance with Chanyeol. This is not what fine looks like. Especially not on Baekhyun.

“You’ve lost weight, haven't you?” he says. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

Baekhyun sighs heavily. “I told you, I'm fine. My stomach’s been a bit off lately, that’s all.”

Chanyeol grins. “'A bit off' is not a very accurate assessment, Dr. Byun. Have you forgotten your history-taking skills up there in the lofty world of plastics? Describe your symptoms,” he says. His tone is teasing, but Jongdae senses what he’s trying to do. By lightening the atmosphere, he might be able to get Baekhyun to open up.

“For God’s sake, it’s just stress, okay?” Baekhyun snaps. “Get off my back for once, would you?”

Silence. Chanyeol looks as stunned as Jongdae feels. It's so unlike Baekhyun that it's hard to process. Baekhyun stares moodily down at his untouched noodles, and Jongdae is sure now that Baekhyun is either sick and doing a not-very-good job of trying to hide it, or that something else is very wrong. He’s trying to decide on another angle that might get his friend’s guard down a little when his pager goes off, beeping loudly through the cafeteria and making every doctor within hearing range twitch.

“Mine,” he calls as he pulls it out. It’s the emergency department, and he sighs regretfully at his half-eaten lunch.

“Let’s catch up sometime soon when we’re not on call,” he tells his friends quickly. “I’ll message you guys later.”

Baekhyun doesn’t even look up. Jongdae sends a glance at Chanyeol, a small jerk of the head and raised eyebrows telling him to get something out of Baekhyun if he can. He’s never known Baekhyun to get sick, but if he’s the kind of person to act like a cranky kid when he’s in pain, a paediatrician is probably the best person to help him.

He jogs towards the elevator, dialing the extension for the ED on his cellphone. The resident picks up on the first ring.

“Min Jisook, female, age 22, arrived 15 minutes ago by private car, presenting with acute abdominal pain since eight am,” she recites. “Her boyfriend drove her here when she collapsed at home about an hour ago. She's haemodynamically unstable with hypotension and tachycardia.”

The symptoms are cause for immediate concern, especially in a young and otherwise healthy woman. "Is pregnancy confirmed?" Jongdae asks.

“Not yet. Her boyfriend says she’s not pregnant and she’s on her period, but I’m not convinced it’s menstrual bleeding. We’re waiting on the urine test now - ah, hold on -” The resident breaks off for a moment, and Jondgae hears the word “positive” in the distance. He’s jabbing the elevator button for the surgical suite even before the resident comes back on to relay the result.

“Do you want a pelvic CT?” the resident asks.

“No,” Jongdae says. "No time. It's an ectopic pregnancy, she'll arrest if we delay for imaging. Transfer her for emergency surgery.”

“I’ll arrange the transfer as soon as we get her stable,” the resident tells him. Jongdae confirms this and hangs up just as the elevator opens onto the surgical suite.

His team assemble over the next few minutes. The intern he first met in the NICU, Lee Kyungri, is on her second week of her obstetrics and gynaecology rotation. She'll observe and assist with simple tasks like holding tools and clamps, and the third year resident, Shin Nara, will assist Jongdae with the surgery itself. The theatre nurses are preparing the operating room as Jongdae and his team scrub in.

The anaesthesiologist, Dr. Bae, arrives at the same time as the patient. Min Jisook has been stabilized, at least temporarily, with two wide-bore IV lines of saline and hanging units of blood. A scrub nurse helps Jongdae gown and glove while Dr. Bae intubates the patient and the head theatre nurse directs her assistants in sterilizing the skin of the abdomen. As they go through the preparatory steps, Jongdae quickly briefs his staff on Jisook's condition and what he's about to do.

Jisook has a ruptured ectopic pregnancy. Instead of travelling to the uterus where it can safely implant, a fertilized egg has implanted in the ovary or fallopian tube. Now, the embryo has grown big enough to rupture whatever part of the reproduction system it has implanted in. Without surgical intervention to remove the embryo and stop the bleeding, Jisook will die.

With no time to wait for a CT scan to tell him the location of the implanted embryo, Jongdae has to perform exploratory surgery to find the rupture. He takes the scalpel handed him by the nurse to his left and starts to incise. Once into the abdominal cavity, he discovers it’s filled with semi-coagulated blood. Just on sight there has to be at least a litre, probably more. It's too much. Two litres of blood loss is enough to kill a patient.

“Drain this,” he tells Nara, and orders six more units of blood. They need to replace the blood Jisook has already lost, and Jongdae needs to find the rupture and close it before she bleeds out.

“Uterus is normal,” he says aloud as he works. He moves towards the left fallopian tube and ovary. “Left tube normal....left ovary…” There it is. “Breach on the surface with an active bleeder.”

The rupture is big and messy, destroying nearly the whole surface of the ovary and bleeding freely. Jongdae starts to electrocauterize, but only seconds later Dr. Bae starts calling dropping blood pressure numbers and the monitor shows a run of ventricular tachycardia.

, , , Jongdae thinks as he tries to cauterize more bleeding vessels. Usually he’s calm in theatre, but the sound of the monitor and the voice of the anaesthesiologist are bringing back the two patients he’s lost in the past couple of months. He cannot lose a third. He will not lose a third.

“I can’t stop the bleed, it's too messy. I'm going to remove the ovary,” he tells Nara across the table. The ovary has been destroyed by the rupture and it’s bleeding out of way too many places. He can’t control it, but if he removes the ovary he can control the bleed for the places he cuts.

The ophorectomy goes swiftly and routinely, and Jongdae starts to have hope. This is going to work. Min Jisook is going to be okay. He’s removed the ovary, controlled the bleeding and is working on cauterising the last few small vessels when Dr. Bae suddenly calls out the word he’s been dreading.

“Arrest!”

The ECG tracings start a chaotic gyration as the heart begins the quivering ventricular fibrillation that heralds an impending flatline. For a split second, Jongdae panics. His fingers go momentarily numb, and that's all it takes from him to lose grip on the electrocauterizer. The tool slips out of his numb fingers and clatters onto the floor at his feet.

Every head in the OR turns to stare. Dropping tools in the OR is a huge mistake, and rarely happens, because every movement is so practiced and carried out with such care.

It’s okay. It's okay. He doesn’t need the electrocauterizer any more anyway. There’s no resuscitation team in the surgical suite, so it’s all up to him this time. He snatches hold of his sanity and starts the resuscitation process. The head nurse hands him the prepped paddles of the defibrillator and he places them on Jisook's chest.

“200 joules," he says. "Shock.”

Jisook's body jerks with the electric pulse. Jongdae hands the paddles back, gets up onto the operating table on his knees so that he’s at the right angle for chest compressions, and starts CPR. Kyungri counts the seconds out loud for him. At two minutes the heart is still in v-fib. Jongdae takes the paddles back.

“360 joules. Shock.”

No change in rhythm. He does another two minutes of chest compressions, but there's still no change in rhythm.

Panic is creeping up on him. He pushes it back with gritted teeth. He must stay calm.

“1 mg epinephrine,” he orders. Nara injects the drug into the wide-bore IV line. Now they're into the resuscitation cycle: two minutes CPR; shock; add epinephrine; then CPR again, repeating the cycle until Jongdae is panting and his arms are shaking with the physical strain of performing compressions. He can't let this happen. The ophorectomy is done, he’s stopped the bleed, Jisook cannot die on him now. Kyungri is up on the other side of the table, ready to take over when he tires, but Jongdae can’t make himself stop. This has to work. He fixed her. Nara has nearly finished closing the abdominal incision with her neat, tidy stitches. Jisook will be fine.

He just has to get her heart going.

He’s on his sixth round of compressions when the tracing on the ECG monitor goes to asystole. This is one of the new monitors with technology that filters out compression artifact, so Jongdae can see the true rhythm of the heart - or lack of it - without having to pause CPR. The flat line runs dispassionately along the screen. Jongdae stares at it. He doesn't stop compressions. He stares desperately at the monitor, his whole body leaning into the compressions, silently begging it to stop showing him that awful flat line. There’s no use using the defibrillator any more. Asystole is unshockable, and it’s pretty much always the end.

He looks around for the anaesthesiologist sitting with her equipment at the head of the table. Usually Jongdae is very confident in his operating room procedures, but right now he feels like a first-year resident again, scared and unsure and desperately needing someone to tell him what to do, because there’s a 22-year-old girl dying under his hands and he can’t, he just can’t let a third patient die.

Dr. Bae meets his panicked gaze with a calm one.

“I’m looking at an asystolic rhythm after twelve minutes of resuscitation,” she says. Just hearing the words aloud helps clarify things in his mind.

“Continuing CPR,” he says.

He lets Kyungri take over compressions for two minutes, shaking out his aching arms and catching his breath. After that they rotate, two minutes each. When Nara finishes closing up she joins in, giving them a little longer to recover from each round. They keep going for another 20 minutes, but the asystole on the heart rate monitor does not change.

“Asystole for 20 minutes,” Dr. Bae says. "Resusciation in progress for 32 minutes total."

Jongdae is on compressions again, nearly mindless with exhaustion. He forces himself to think. He may want to deny what’s happening and keep doing CPR until he collapses, but that’s not how he should be handling this. That’s not what a surgeon should do. If this was happening while he was assisting a senior surgeon, what would he expect them to do?

The answer is horribly clear. Twelve minutes of v-fib followed by twenty of asystole? He’d expect them to stop. This patient is not coming back.

Jongdae lifts his hands off Jisook's chest and gets off the operating table. His whole body is aching. He checks the pupils, the carotid pulse. He asks the room if they object to him calling the code, gets silence on response. He looks one last time at the flatline tracing on the ECG monitor.

“Time of death," he says. "15:22.” His voice rings hollow around the quiet room.

He backs away from the table and leans against the wall of the OR. Nara takes Kyungri's arm and leads her out to de-scrub. The theatre nurses start to clean and prepare to transfer Jisook's body to the 6-hour room.

Jongdae has gone years without a table death, they’re so rare in his speciality. He feels distant, unreal, like this can't really be happening. He wants to pinch himself, but he's only too aware that he's not dreaming.

Surely something is wrong about this. Why does he keep losing patients? Why couldn’t he save this girl?

Dr. Bae has finished retrieving her intubation equipment. Instead of leaving, she comes over to stand in front of him.

“Dr. Kim? Are you alright?” They’re still wearing their surgical masks and caps, so he can’t see anything of her face except her eyes.

Jongdae tries to find an answer to that question. All he can come up with is, "I don't know."

“You did everything right,” Dr. Bae says. “The resuscitation effort was textbook. Did you see how much blood they drained? Two and a half litres out of the abdominal cavity. That was all before you got to her.”

Jongdae nods hollowly. It should help to hear that he did everything right, but somehow it doesn’t. If he did everything right, why wasn't the outcome better? If he did everything right, why did she die?

Dr. Bae pats his shoulder and leaves. Orderlies arrive to take out the body. The nurses finish counting their equipment and take it to be sterilized. When they’re all gone and he’s left alone, he slides down the wall until he’s sitting on the cold floor. He rests his elbows on his knees and lowers his head, bloody gloves dangling. He shuts his eyes. The monitor with the asystole line on it jumps into his mind's eye.

This isn’t why he became a doctor. He can't handle things like this.

But he has to handle it. He's the surgeon. He's in charge. He doesn't get to break down. He has to pull himself together.

He has to go and break the news to Jisook's family, and nothing’s going to get him out of that.

He forces himself to stand up, to take off his bloodied surgical scrubs and clean himself up. It’s not fair to keep them waiting like this.

Just get through the meeting, he tells himself as he scrubs his hands and arms as hard as he can with yellow antimicrobial soap. Just get through the meeting.

He walks down the hallway outside the operating room and through the double doors that lead to the family waiting area. A heavyset young man stands up when he calls for the family of Min Jisook. He’s her boyfriend, he tells Jongdae.

“Are there any other family members here?” Jongdae asks. He’d rather not repeat this if they’re nearby, but Nam Hodeok tells him her parents live in another city and won't arrive for hours.

"Okay. Would you come with me into the family meeting room so we can talk privately?" he asks, gesturing towards the closed door off the main corridor. There are a couple of other people scattered around the waiting area, not within earshot of a quiet conversation, but it's still better to do this kind of thing in private. Hodeok shakes his head and stands his ground. He looks both impatient and frustrated.

"Just get on with it," he snaps, and Jongdae can tell there's no point in arguing.

“Jisook had what’s called an ectopic pregnancy,” Jongdae begins, but Hodeok interrupts immediately.

“Bull. She wasn’t pregnant.”

Jongdae fights back a twinge of nervousness. Hodeok is much taller and broader than him, and he's glaring down at Jongdae, meaty fists clenching at his sides. He's suddenly grateful he's not alone in the family room with this man, after all.

“She may not have known it yet. She was probably less than six weeks along,” he explains. “But the emergency department did a test to confirm her pregnancy, and -”

“She said she had her period! How do you explain that, then?” Hodeok asks aggressively. All Jongdae's instincts are telling him to back away, but he can’t. He’s the surgeon, he’s supposed to be in control of the situation, and arguing about whether Jisook was or wasn’t pregnant is really pointless.

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Mistycal #1
Chapter 2: Daddy chen!
Mistycal #2
This looks so cool man like MEDICAL? And looks so well-planned ♡
Rshinichi
#3
Chapter 36: the last chapter is soooooooooooooooo sweet! my heart feels really warm! i wish this would go on forever and ever like 26 seasons or smthng 🤭
Rshinichi
#4
Chapter 35: Minseok watching the "family" go as he holds back his tears... That really shot a hole through my heart 😭
Rshinichi
#5
Chapter 34: Finallllyyy back after my exam break.
Tbh, whoever responsible for the "Doctorness" in this chapter (especially joonmyun's part) really deserves a dozen Grammys!
And OMGGG DR. KYUNGRI AND ZITAO!!!!! I still haven't recovered from the laughing fit!
Rshinichi
#6
Chapter 30: minseok's story really makes me cry... i dont particularly like Jangmi and the way she blames everything on him instead of understanding his feelings </3
ilovewattpad
#7
The series is kinda like Chicago Med TV series~~~
Rshinichi
#8
Chapter 27: jongin and jongdae are such a wholesome duo ! <3
Rshinichi
#9
Chapter 24: OMG THIS SHOULD BE PUPLISHED!!!!!
i know michan is truly an amazing writer but missminew!!!!!! now im gonna read all of missminew's stories like i read michan's !!!!
im still reading this and i am soooooooo hoooooooked!!!!
ilovewattpad
#10
I'll be saving this and printing it out to be placed in my physical library! I totally would recommend this to all EXO-Ls!!!