Chapter 11 – Grandmother Mi-seon (2)

‘Senior Shin Jeong-eun seemed to know something about Grandmother Mi-seon!’

Ji-hyuk set out to meet Senior Shin Jeong-eun immediately.

Near the hospital, in the lounge.

“How does America make things like this?”

Shin Jeong-eun was eating cola and cookies from the US military PX.

The US military had opened a PX in Busan in August 1950, and this PX was a distribution channel for American food and beverages, a place so well-stocked that it was like a large modern department store.

The black market trading of smuggling goods through the PX and selling them at high prices to the wealthy of Busan was highly active, after all.

At any rate.

“Later, our Korea will make them much better. Everything.”

“Hmm, will such a day come?”

“Of course. Since the Hallyu wave will sweep the entire world.”

“Hallyu?”

“Ah! Well… Shall we just call it a great wave of the Republic of Korea? I am confident. Our country will become the best in the world in every field.”

“How wonderful would it be if it really happens as Dr. Ji-hyuk says?”

“Dreams surely come true!”

“Yes! I will also work hard to make that dream come true!”

Shin Jeong-eun smiled brightly.

Like that, after Ji-hyuk and Jeong-eun shared the cola and snacks.

“I have something I’m curious about, may I ask you just one thing?”

“Two things are fine too! Well, three isn’t bad either.”

She smiled brightly.

“You said you were born and raised here, Senior?”

“Yes.”

“Then you must know Grandmother Mi-seon well too?”

“Ah… Why ask about Grandmother?”

Shin Jeong-eun wore a slightly flushed expression at the mention of Grandmother Mi-seon.

“I think Grandmother is a bit strange.”

“Mmh, she is just an ordinary grandmother……”

Shin Jeong-eun cut her words short as if trying to avoid mentioning it.

“No. It seems she is hiding something.”

“Come on, aren’t you being too sensitive? What would she hide? Just as things are……”

“Grandmother… does not have dementia. In my opinion as a doctor!”

“……!”

At that, Shin Jeong-eun looked startled.

“Please tell me. What kind of secret she has.”

“It is nothing. Just……”

“No. It is extremely important to me! So if there is anything you know, please tell me.”

“W-well……”

She hesitated.

“Please tell me. I beg you!”

“Phew, it seems you won’t back down. Right?”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

“Mmh, okay. Since things have turned out this way, I will tell you as much as I know.”

As Ji-hyuk showed no signs of backing down, Shin Jeong-eun had no choice but to open her mouth.

A moment later.

“What? Grandmother Mi-seon has prophetic powers?”

“Yes. And to a very surprising degree.”

Shin Jeong-eun nodded.

“So what happened?”

Asked Kim Ji-hyuk, his curiosity exploding.

“Her prophetic power to predict the future was scary. That’s why the villagers visited Grandmother whenever something came up.”

“And then?”

“Each time, Grandmother gave them a prophecy……”

“What did she prophesy?”

Gulp. Kim Ji-hyuk’s Adam’s apple bobbed.

“She always got it right! And only the unfortunate futures……”

‘You must never go to Fairy Rock!’

“……!”

Recalling the words Grandmother Mi-seon had said, Kim Ji-hyuk got goosebumps all over his body.

“S-so? Why is she pretending to have dementia?”

Kim Ji-hyuk’s heart began to beat wildly.

“Unfortunate events kept happening, so the villagers later began to frame her as a cursed witch.”

“Ah, because unfortunate events kept happening?”

“Yes. They say the scariest thing in this world is people, and indeed it was! Such simple, good-hearted people turned into devils overnight.”

Sigh, Shin Jeong-eun let out a deep sigh.

“So she goes around pretending to have dementia?”

“Probably. Because that would be better. Maybe she hoped it would just look like a crazy person rambling……”

It was right then.

“Dr. Kim Ji-hyuk! Here you are! I’ve been looking for you so much!”

Out of breath, a woman ran toward Kim Ji-hyuk and Shin Jeong-eun. She was Nurse Min Su-hyeon.

“What is it?”

Recognizing instantly that it was an emergency, Kim Ji-hyuk and Shin Jeong-eun stood up abruptly.

“It is an emergency! An accident happened. An accident!”

She gasped for breath.

“What kind of accident? Speak quickly!”

“Th-that, a US military tank seems to have hit a person while moving! Their life is in critical danger right now. I think you must go quickly!”

Nurse Min Su-hyeon pulled Kim Ji-hyuk’s sleeve in an urgent voice.

“Understood! Senior, we’ll talk later, let’s go quickly!”

“What do we do? Talk about bad timing, all the surgical professors are down in Geoje, aren’t they?”

Shin Jeong-eun wore a troubled expression.

“We have no choice. We have to do it ourselves. Let’s go quickly!”

“Yes.”

Like that, Kim Ji-hyuk pulled Shin Jeong-eun’s wrist.

“Is that possible with just us?”

“We must make it possible. Summary of page, time is most important right now.”

“We have no choice. O-okay.”

Like that, Shin Jeong-eun ran down to the emergency room with Kim Ji-hyuk.

“Nurse Min! What is the patient’s gender and age?”

“A grandmother! I don’t know the age yet!”

“A grandmother?”

“Yes. She looked quite elderly.”

“Ah, got it.”

* * *

A moment later, emergency room.

‘Th-this can’t be!’

The patient who arrived at the emergency room was a grandmother who looked to be in her sixties. Absurdly, it was Grandmother Mi-seon.

Having severely injured her head, she was bleeding heavily, and large and small contusions were scattered across her body.

She was also barely conscious.

It was definitely a hyper-acute emergency patient at a glance.

“Grandmother! Grandmother Mi-seon! Please wake up! It’s me, Jeong-eun!”

Shin Jeong-eun shook the patient.

“…… silence/dots

Completely unconscious.

But Grandmother Mi-seon did not respond at all.

“Senior, the patient is unconscious. Shaking her like that is dangerous.”

“Ah, got it. What do we do?”

Shin Jeong-eun, with a panicked face, could not speak further.

“Senior, press this down hard here for now.”

Kim Ji-hyuk quickly pulled out gauze and handed it to Shin Jeong-eun.

Although Kim Ji-hyuk was equally panicked, he couldn’t just stand there shaken, so he entered into full-scale emergency procedures.

“Got it!”

As Shin Jeong-eun firmly pressed the affected area with the gauze handed to her by Kim Ji-hyuk, the bleeding was slowly stopping.

But this alone was not enough to do anything.

‘The laceration on the scalp is nothing major. A few stitches would be enough! But……’

The patient was bleeding from a laceration of about three centimeters near the crown, but it was certainly not a major injury.

‘But the problem is the lung!’

Feeling Grandmother Mi-seon’s neck, the jugular vein was severely distended.

Furthermore, her blood pressure was falling helplessly.

Placing a stethoscope on her chest to listen, breath sounds were absent on one side.

Thump, thump, thump!

Percussing the patient’s chest produced a dull sound, as if striking with a hammer.

‘Th-then!?’

Hemothorax accompanied by traumatic pneumothorax!

Her ribs must have broken due to the sudden accident, and a broken rib fragment became a sharp weapon that pierced into her lungs.

There was no doubt that a hemothorax had occurred as a result.

“Senior! Lidocaine!”

“Pardon? What are you asking for?”

“What do you mean? I asked for lidocaine. Quick!”

“Dr. Ji-hyuk, what are you saying? Where would we have lidocaine in our hospital? There’s no way a drug that was developed not long ago would be in our hospital, right?”

Shin Jeong-eun had a troubled expression.

‘No lidocaine? I thought it was developed in the mid-1940s?’

Lidocaine was a local anesthetic developed in 1943 by Sweden’s Löfgren and Bengt Lundqvist and marketed in 1948.

However, it seemed it had not been commercialized in earnest yet.

“We have no choice. Then give me whatever! You must have some local anesthetic!”

“We have tetracaine. Will that do?”

“Tetracaine? We are using that?? Don’t you know that ester-type local anesthetics are no longer used in clinical practice?”

“Ugh, what are you saying?? We should be grateful to even have this right now. We are in the middle of a war, so it’s not a situation where we can pick and choose. You know that well.”

Rather, it was Shin Jeong-eun who was frustrated.

Tetracaine: a highly toxic ester-type anesthetic that was no longer used clinically after the mid-1940s. It was a moment that clearly revealed how poor our medical environment was during the Korean War.

“It is highly toxic, so it won’t be good for an elderly patient like Grandmother Mi-seon… Never mind! Nurse Min! Please bring even that quickly.”

“Yes. Got it, Doctor!”

Soon, Nurse Min hurriedly brought the local anesthetic.

“By the way, what do you plan to do with this?”

Shin Jeong-eun asked in curiosity.

“It is a hemothorax accompanied by a tension pneumothorax.”

“Ah, hemothorax!”

“Yes, hemothorax! Since blood is pooling, we have no choice but to drain it using a centesis.”

“Phew, can we do it?”

“Even if we can’t, we must. The professors are not here.”

“Mmh… Okay! We learned it in class anyway, and just as Dr. Ji-hyuk said, if it’s not us, Grandmother Mi-seon will die! It doesn’t seem like a time to argue over this and that indeed! It’s make-or-break, so let’s try as much as we can.”

Shin Jeong-eun pursed her lips firmly.

“Yes. Let’s save Grandmother somehow!”

“Yes. In that case, we will need blood, right? It seems she lost a lot of blood.”

As Shin Jeong-eun said, if a large amount of blood is accumulated in the pleural cavity, performing a thoracentesis will cause bleeding, so it is correct to proceed with blood transfusion simultaneously.

However, now was not the situation for that, and because the heart was being compressed by the air and blood accumulated in the pleural cavity, cardiac arrest could occur at any moment.

Grandmother Mi-seon’s life was hanging by a thread.

Now was not the time to worry about bleeding.

Fortunately, the volume of blood in the pleural cavity was not yet at a level requiring transfusion.

Of course, it would become so over time, but.

“Yes. I think we will need blood for transfusion!”

“Yes. I will check.”

Fortunately, Ji-hyuk had drawn the grandmother’s blood in advance to run the dementia tests.

“Just checking is not enough! We must secure at least ten packs of O-type blood somehow!”

“……By the way, how did you know the patient’s blood type?”

“I have blood collected to run the dementia test.”

“I see. Got it! I will try to get it somehow.”

“Yes. And please page Yun-seok to the emergency room!”

“Yes, yes.”

Shin Jeong-eun hurried out of the emergency room.

A moment later.

“Grandmother Mi-seon was hit by an armored vehicle?”

Kim Yun-seok, paged by Shin Jeong-eun, came down to the emergency room, and.

“Yeah. There’s no time to explain at length right now, so let’s start immediately. I will handle the anesthesia.”

Kim Ji-hyuk immediately injected local anesthetic into the affected area.

“Give me the syringe!”

Once the anesthetic entered, Kim Ji-hyuk reached out his hand.

“You can really do well, right?”

Kim Yun-seok hesitated, worried.

“Driver, let’s only think about Grandmother Mi-seon right now. We have no options. We just have to hope the choice we made is correct! Give it to me!”

“Got it.”

Kim Ji-hyuk received the syringe.

He inserted the needle along the sixth intercostal space midaxillary line.

“Nurse Min! Give me the tube!”

“Yes, Doctor!”

Once he connected the tube brought by Nurse Min and inserted one end into the drainage bottle, dark red blood and air began to flow out after a moment.

“Stop! Clamp!”

Since a certain amount of blood had accumulated in the drainage bottle, there was no need to drain any further.

“Yes!”

“You can do the dressing, right?”

“Of course I can!”

After leaving the dressing to Kim Yun-seok, Kim Ji-hyuk examined the patient’s abdomen immediately.

‘The hemothorax is a problem, but there is a bigger problem right now! Actually, the area that worries me more than the hemothorax is the abdomen. If my predictions are correct, the internal organs must have all collapsed like soft tofu.’

The patient’s abdomen was bulging.

Grandmother Mi-seon’s condition was far more serious than Kim Ji-hyuk’s prediction.

‘To this extent!?’