This diary belongs to Lee Seunghyun

Page: 2

Date: 23-May-2021

You know how I know it’s May? Because everything and everybody inside the hospital just seems to move slower, as if, after a difficult winter all of them who were hiding inside their confined cages are suddenly crawling out, blindfolded aimlessly by the hopeful lights of spring. Those loud, bashful families at Christmas time are now found to be surrounding their sick loved ones, peacefully speaking in calm hushed tones and radiating small glimpses of shy smiles from their faces; all of that adorned by a smooth, sparkly orange light steaming from the warm spring sun sneaking a glance through the windows.

Though, that’s how I know is spring for everyone else, but for me time does not represent a change in my way of being or living but just a change on my surroundings. Today, after my morning round I got time to have a few quick glances into the medical records I got yesterday. They were yearning out to me, standing proud from the rest of non-important things scattered over my always empty, untidy office. My eyes were drawn to the sheets of paper as if a small cry was being voiced “Yah, take a look at us”. So, this is what I found, or at least, what I think is the really interesting information I should share: two ladies between their forties, three old terminal guys without a place to land death, and a 28 years old boy, the one with the pink wisp of hair I told about yesterday. All of them are in someway or another, suffering from some serious heart diseases. The truth is that, at least for me, three of them seemed to be just plain hopeless cases.

Today could have been a completely normal day, it could have ended as always: short and boring. If it was not for the little incident I got myself involved in the last awaiting minutes of the day. After I picked up the daily treatment records from some of my patients at the nursing station, and, because I still had one hour left before my schedule ended, I decided to do one more round before leaving the hospital.

The hospital at night transforms itself into a three-habitants house: the always-awake beings from the emergency room, the lethargic ones from the non-emergency floor, and the inexistent ones from the Family Medicine department. The ward under my responsibility was, at that hour, eerily silent. From time to time some quiet voices from a switched-on TV broke into the silence, leaving an echoing sound to run along the length of the corridor. I was there, walking serenely, gazing at the doors from each one of my patient’s rooms… “402, 403, 404, 405….” Until I reached room reading 408, whose door, was strangely ajar. And here in the hospital there’s a belief that an ajar door is a cue for something to be going terribly wrong.

I approached to the door and pushed it abrubtly open entering to a room that was shrouded in darkness only illuminated by a tenuous light emerging from the back of the room. I stared at the name plastered over the door next to me before walking in: Patient 408. Kwon Jiyong.

“Mr. Kwon?”, I asked trying to see something or anything through the dark that was only thickened because of the closed blinds which blocked the weak streams of light that were emmited from the moon. No one answered me so I squinted my eyes, trying to focus on the weak light in front of me. After making an enormous effort, I spotted a pink haired guy seated over his bed, with his knees folded in front of him. He was holding a small pocket-lamp with his left hand lightening his lap,where his right hand was smoothly and fluently moving over a notebook.

“Mr. Kwon?”, I repeated raising my voice slightly. At that moment I was just too confused about the whole situation. He raised his eyes slowly, staring at me intrigued and a little bit bothered.

“Sir, are you ok?”, I asked him. I had many questions in my mind at that moment but how could I possibly ask him something? My work requires me to stay professional under all circumstances.

“Who are you?”, He asked, ignoring the fact that I was wearing a white coat and that over my chest was hanging a little badge that showed my name on it: Dr. Lee Seunghyun.

“I’m Dr. Lee Seunghyun your cardiologist”, I simply answered trying to sound as professional as possible.

But he only made a grunting sound with his mouth, looking down again before he asked, “And what do you want?”. Can you believe that? Apart from the fact I was dressed as a doctor, I had just stated I was his cardiologist and that he was an ill patient; I knew that the most obvious answer to that question was not exactly the most accurate one.

“Just curiosity”, I said, quietly and shyly. He turned his face towards me, this time with a curious smile. I guess because of how sheepish I was sounding. “About what?”, he questioned me raising one of his eyebrows.

“Why is your hair pink?”, I blurted out. Something now I’m really embarrassed about.

“Ahh, this”, He said scratching his head “Well, I thought that most of the famous people in the word are remembered because of a single distinguished feature. Like Dali and his weird moustache or Einstein and his messy gray hair so...” he faltered, “I thought that when I die I want to be remembered by some weird, dorky feature, and I came up with this”, he explained touching his head proudly which in the dark seemed to be sparkled with purple beams.

“That’s disastrous”, I murmured, to what he started to laugh.

“What? my hair or my reasons?”, he asked.

“Both of them”.

“I thought so”, he replied focusing again on his notebook, biting his lower lip, concentrated on the movement of his hand. After a moment of silence he sighed and murmured with a small smile tugging at his lips, “Disastrous is a nice word,” staring proudly at his notebook.

In curiosity, I bent myself closer to him in an attempt to catch a glimpse of what he was writing, but he was faster than me and slapped his rather hard backed notebook over my unexpecting face. “You could have just asked,” he added with a pout while I grabbed the leather bound notebook and rubbed my sore nose in pain. 

His notebook was full of little written fragments that seemed, at first for me, like little poems. But, when I asked him if he was a poet he just shrugged nonchalantly and told me “You can put it that way, but I prefer to call them lyrics”.

“So, you are a musician”, I corrected myself but he just grumbled an incoherently “A neglected one”, and then moved his attention to fitting the blankets over his uncovered feet before asking me all of a sudden, “Do you write anything?”

I could have told him about this so called diary but can you imagine how foolish I would have appeared to be if I had answered to him: “Yeah, I write a diary and I’m your cardiologist”. If our conversation was not awkward enough, that answer would have turned things actually awkward. So I decided to answer with a simple “No, I don’t”, to what he just sighed as if he expected another kind of intriguing answer.

“You are annoyingly boring”, he stated with a blank face but surprisingly quick hands grabbed a certain someones notebook from between my fingers. His sleeve however got hitched in the process, uncovering an arm habouring a sea of bruises due to the amount of saline and drugs being injected through his veins. Those made my heart cringe in discomfort. He seemed too young, and too awake; he expertly managed to present himself as anything else except for an ill terminal patient.

“And your amazingly disrespectful”, I answered with a hint of annoyance rubbing my nose which still throbbed in pain with one hand and taking my beeper out from my pocket, which had started chiming that very moment. I walked with heavy steps towards the door but a small voice caught my ears voice “Hope to see you soon”, making me stop baffled and confused.

Even though it was just plain obvious I was going to see him again, that naivety of him just made my lips curve into a smile. He seems too detached from everything around him. The truth is, I wished those brief moments could have been longer and not because of the fact that I actually talked to someone, because I do speak with people, I do share words with my fellows. But talking with him was like being at the edge. Without knowing what he would reply with. His answers were just unpredictably satsifying.

Tomorrow I will start with some clinical studies with the new patients, from room 406 to 411. My mind was still scanning over those yellowish and former purple marks painfully etched over Kwon Jiyong’s china white arms, and his shortness of breath. His problem seemed to be associated with a valve disorder. But I really don’t want to speculate so I guess I’m going to wait until tomorrow's results.

By the way, unfortunately my interesting conversation with Kwon Jiyong was interrupted because today I lost a patient. Soo Jong, an old lady from room 421, she died this night after a tough 5 years struggling with an angina pectoris. Her daughter approached me with lifeless eyes asking me what would I recommend her to do with her dead mother's corpse. Her eyes were as frightened as mine after hearing her question. What could I say to answer that?

I told her what a doctor always says: That her mother could be a donor and help other people to survive, but she looked at me with an emotionless face as she retreated to let her mind think. Was that really a good answer?  Sometimes I ask myself what’s the use to be a doctor? We try, sometimes we win and sometimes we don’t. But here we are, always fighting against the natural course of life.

And within this fight sometimes we lose the few traces of humanity that still remain inside us and turn ourselves into something distant from a human. I’m deeply scared to turn into something like that. A machine, whose only target is to fight against illness, against life's plan.

But what if the treatment is more painful for the sick one than death itself? Should I condemn Kwon Jiyong to a torture filled life, when we know that despite everything he is going to die at the end of everything?

Those are the constant struggles of being a doctor.

Lee SH

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