Golden Time

Professor Lee continued to check her condition.

‘What is going on?’ Her mental state fell to less than that of a kindergartener’s. Not only is the brain normal but there is also consciousness. He cannot easily detect the cause of her sickness.

While Professor Lee Mansuk was thinking about it for a while, Suhyuk came.

“Do you know her?”

“Yes.”

Suhyuk, grabbed her hands with an anxious expression.

“Are you sick?”

Suhyuk, who threw out the question, was forced to take a short sigh.

For she kept speaking strangely. It seemed she had symptoms of an addiction, but she only had seaweed rolls and miso soup. At that moment, Suhyuk’s gaze moved toward her lips.

Marks of white milk on her mouth. Suhyuk quickly returned to the elderly men.

“How is Mrs. Bang? Is it difficult for her to get up?”

“How can she... Did she come to her senses?”

When he showed an anxious face, so did their faces.

Suhyuk laughed forcibly. He was trying to make the elders feel at ease as much as possible.

“Do you know what kind of medicine she put in milk?”

Everyone was puzzled by Suhyuk’s question.

“I hear it was something like seeds.”

“Seeds? What seeds?”

“It was a type of flower... What was it? Yes, morning glory, morning glory!”

“Wasn’t it called the morning glory of an angel?”

Suhyuk’s eyes became slightly bigger, and he bowed his head as if he had heard the answer he was looking for.

“Thank you.”

He found a clue. He turned back and went back to the ICU room.

He took out his cell phone and started searching on the web.

All kinds of information related to flowers and medical care came out.

When he picked one of them, Suhyuk’s face frowned.

‘Morning glory of an angel...’ The name given to the flower because it resembled the shape of the trumpet an angel held in their mouth.

It was beautiful, but unlike its appearance, there was venom everywhere in flowers, leaves, stems and seeds. That was the morning glory of an angel.

Suhyuk’s gait moved more quickly.

“She seems to have been poisoned.”

“Poison?”

Prof. Lee, who had been looking at Suhyuk, now turned his eyes to her.

Mysterious mumbling, unconsciousness, paralysis.

If she has been poisoned, all of this is explained.

“You said she fell over?”

“I feel she had the poisonous seeds of the morning glory of an angel, and it seemed she was struck by paralysis and then fell.”

Suhyuk handed over his cell phone to him.

The professor, looking at the cell phone screen, opened his mouth,

“Why are you talking about it now?”

“I just found out about it now...By the way she needs some sap fast...”

The professor went to the resident who was watching the MRI closely and gave him proper instructions. So a needle was put into her forearm. It was a sap that diluted toxicity.

Suhyuk grasped her hand that was still gesturing in the air.

“Grandma, why did you take it...”

Morning glory of an angel. It was also used as a medicinal material.

However, eating it alone is very dangerous because the dosage of the drug can not be strictly measured and an appropriate amount cannot be taken. An appropriate dosage should be taken according to the doctor’s prescription.

The rumor that just eating it is good for your health made her become addicted to it.

“You’ll be ok again a little bit later.”

She heard words that felt like a hallucination and was in a semi-consciousness like dreaming.

Time will heal her wounds, after all.

Until the sap in her body has diluted all the toxins, she will have to wait until then.

“Pretty, pretty.”

She again made a strange sound and tangled his hair.

Suhyuk, who felt her hand gently, stood up with a smile, and said,

“Please wait a moment. Let me bring your friends here. I’ll be back.”

Suhyuk brought them into the ICU.

They continued to speak to her with a sad expression.

“What’s wrong with you, Mrs. Bang? Wake up!”

Suhyuk put those surprised seniors at ease.

“She’ll be okay in a little bit. Do not worry too much.”

“Oh, you got sick like this because you ate strange food!”

“Don’t give the doctor too much trouble. Come to your senses quick!”

While they gathered around her, Suhyuk slipped out of the room.

Suhyuk, coming to the front, asked an a.s.sistant, “How much does Mrs. Bang Jungja owe?”

“Wait a moment.”

The a.s.sistant said, knocking on the keyboard, “I guess your family member is here for treatment.”

“Yes,” said Suhyuk.

“Her balance is 128,700 won.”

Suhyuk gave his credit card without any hesitation.

“It’s already been paid.”

“Really?”

“Yes, the monitor shows it’s been fully paid.”

Suhyuk tilted his head.

‘Who paid?’

Those elderly people could not have paid it because they had never come to the front desk since she was struck by poison.

“Can you tell me who paid it?”

“Wait a minute.”

“Professor Lee Mansuk paid.”

‘Why did he...’

No matter how he thought about why he paid, he had no idea.

He felt he had to go and see Prof. Lee after his clinical practice.

“Take care!” he left, after wis.h.i.+ng her goodbye.

***

“Where have you been, Lee Suhyuk?”

He was 20 minutes late. Suhyuk bowed his head at Park Ganghyun’s sharp tone.

“I am sorry. Someone I knew came here for treatment.”

“Well then, you should have contacted me first. Still, your late arrival is a mistake because you have kept everybody waiting.”

“I’m sorry.”

“After the practice, go to the emergency room and clean it up for two hours before going home. Don’t disturb the other doctors, okay?”

“Yes.”

So the practice started again, and Suhyuk visited her at every break and checked her condition. Her condition was getting better over time just as he thought it would.

In one more day she could be fully recovered enough to be discharged, as long as she does not have any other emergency.

Checking her condition again, Suhyuk looked around but could not find Professor Lee.

“I’ll come back later.”

After greeting the elders, he moved back to his place.

Practice was hectic busy. Some of the students grabbed their heads out of stress.

No matter how hard they tried and focused, Park’s explanation sounded like an alien language. Whenever they ran into such trouble, Suhyuk had to answer their questions.

When asked, Suhyuk came up with answers to their satisfaction.

Stunned, they took down his words.

They felt it was much easier and faster to understand Suhyuk’s succinct paraphrasing than Park’s difficult medical explanation, thinking as if they could get full scores in practice test. The hours of such hard work in practice quickly pa.s.sed.

Exhausted, the students went to their dorms or to their homes.

Meanwhile, Suhyuk was moving to the emergency room.

‘By this time, she will have come back to her senses. I’ll have to see her once more.’

When Suhyuk was thinking of her, he heard a “Woh!” from behind.

It was Choi Suryon, who was touching his shoulder.

She shook her head. He should have been surprised if someone touched him suddenly from behind, but he looked calm like a mannequin.

“Didn’t you go back home?” asked Suhyuk.

She tied her long straight hair back, saying,

“How can I go home alone when I know one of my group was having a hard time? Besides, I learned a lot from you...”

“You don’t have to feel that way. Just go home first,” he said.

She was already walking ahead of him.

Shaking his head, Suhyuk followed her.

“Sir, the patient’s blood pressure is dropping.”

“You were bitten by a dog?”

The emergency room was always chaotic.

In the center of the room, Suhyuk took in a few breaths and controlled his mind.

If one stays with a lot of emergency patients like this, one feels delirious before one knows it.

Actually he was touching a patient before he knew it.

It was something he used to do in the past. Surprisingly, the symptoms disappeared when he constantly beat himself up in his head, realizing his weird behavior.

But when he sees patients, he still could not help but approach them.

Suhyuk collected some b.l.o.o.d.y gauze and medical tools that nurses had not been able to get close to in an empty bed. When he did that, the nurses laughed at Suhyuk,

“Thank you.”

“Do not pay attention to me. Just work comfortably,” Suhyuk also laughed.

“You look too easy-going, don’t you?” asked Suryon, to which he shrugged his shoulders.

Then resident Oh Byungchul approached them.

“What are you doing here instead of going home?”

Suhyuk scratched his head, saying,

“I was late for today, so I was a.s.signed to clean up the emergency room for two hours.”

“Who gave this punishment to you?”

“Resident Park Ganghyun.”

“Don’t slack off if you want to be a doctor...”

He nodded and stared at Choi, asking, “You too?”

She laughed and said, “I came to help him.”

Oh cast a suspicious look.

“Are you two dating?”

“No,” Suhyuk answered at once, and Choi, who could not speak, touched her cheeks as if she were shy.

Oh looked at them alternately with embarra.s.sed eyes, saying,

“Don’t cause any trouble and don’t stand in the way.”

Then he left the place, touching his cell phone. He was sending a text message somewhere.

“One more hour to go,” said Suryon.

At her words, Suhyuk moved again to clean up.

At that moment a sharp voice was heard from the door.

“My child was hurt.”

A woman came to the emergency room carrying a child.

The child’s left hand was rolled up with tissue paper, wet with blood.

A nurse came and lay the child down on the bed where Suhyuk was standing.

“How did the child get hurt?”

The mother answered quickly, “He was stabbed by a shard of pottery.”

“Stabbed? While he was playing?”

The mother whose face turned pale said,

“Yes, he was playing at home when some pottery fell... He then got his finger hurt. Is he going to be okay?”

The nurse’s response was quick. She pulled off the stuck tissue paper and began disinfecting it.

Suhyuk, next to her, examined the child’s finger closely.

The blood stopped and his fingernails were blue. And there was no piece of broken pottery in his finger. “The fingernail will likely come out...” That’s it. It seemed the bones had no problem.

The resident, approaching the child, examined his finger, when Suhyuk smiled bitterly, thinking it’s fortunate for him.

“I do not think there is a problem with the bones, but the fingernails will be lost, but the finger will be okay after it’s been disinfected and dressed,” said the resident.

At the doctor’s words, tears dripped from the mother’s eyes.

Suhyuk turned back and moved to another place for fear the resident and the nurse taking care of the child felt uncomfortable. Choi looked at his back quietly.

His murmuring after looking at the patient was the same as the doctor’s diagnosis.

There was nothing he did not know. Her brows, knitted a moment ago, became relaxed again.

Then she heard a voice calling her.

“What are you doing here?”

It was Park Ganghyun.

“Oh, I just wanted to help Suhyuk...”

“Did I tell you to do that?”

Uncharacteristic of him, Park’s face was hardened. His strange eyes looking at her.

On the other hand, he felt annoyed at Suhyuk’s appearance from behind, who had been collecting gauze.

“Lee Suhyuk!” he called him.

Suhyuk and Suryon were standing before him.

Park, looking at them alternately, opened his mouth,

“Are you two on a date here? I think I clearly told you to clean it up alone?”

He had on a look that showed he did not like their behavior.

At that moment there heard a voice from out the door.

“What’s going on?”

Park quickly bowed his head. It was Professor Lee Mansuk.

“What made you punish them like this?”