Fifth Vital [EN]: Chapter 203

Five Vital Signs – Episode 203

Episode 203. Even if We Run Away, Let’s Go After Treatment

The Next Day –

After a chaotic night, a peaceful morning arrived.

Taekyung, who had been in the emergency room, got up from the station to check on the homeless man’s condition and make his usual early rounds.

“I’ll go to the ward for a bit.”

“Okay. But what have you been carrying around since earlier?”

Nurse Lim Jung-sook pointed to the small booklet Taekyung was holding.

“Ah! This?”

“Yes, you’ve been holding it since you came back from the examination room, except when you were seeing patients. Is it something important?”

“Of course. It’s important. It might even change someone’s life, you could say?”

“Huh? Change a life? Whose life?”

“I’ll let you know when their life changes.”

“What is it? Did he win the lottery or something?”

Lee Chan-hee, watching Taekyung leave the emergency room, received a glare from Choi Mona for his absurd answer.

“Stop with the unfunny jokes and go see your patients.”

“Okay, okay.”

A little later-

After meticulously checking on the patients and before seeing the last room, Taekyung approached the nurse at the ward station.

“Lee Byung-chul hasn’t gone anywhere, has he?”

“Of course not. I checked 30 minutes ago.”

Lee Byung-chul, whom the nurse confirmed, was the homeless man’s name.

Taekyung was worried that Lee Byung-chul might run away again after his surgery and transfer from the recovery room to the ward. So, he kept reminding the ward nurses to check on him whenever they had a chance.

Of course, it seemed unlikely that a patient who had just undergone surgery would run away in his still-recovering state, but you never knew.

A person who has run away once can easily run away two or three times, so he had to be watched carefully.

“Thank you every time, doctor.”

“You’re welcome. Then, rest well.”

Taekyung entered the multi-person room and met the patients in turn, finally approaching the bed where the homeless man, Lee Byung-chul, was.

“Excuse me?”

He called out in front of the tightly closed curtains, but there was only silence in response.

“Mr. Lee Byung-chul?”

Creak-

“Oh! Doctor, that man went out a while ago?”

Just as Taekyung was about to pull back the curtain, a guardian came out of the room’s bathroom and said.

“Went out?”

Perhaps because he had a history of running away, Taekyung’s heart sank for a moment.

“Yes.”

Whirr-

As soon as the guardian finished speaking, Taekyung yanked the curtain open, only to find the bed indeed empty.

“How long has this patient been gone?”

“Well, about 20 or 30 minutes ago? Something like that, I think……”

Before the guardian could finish speaking, Taekyung left the room and was about to head to the station when it happened.

“……!”

As he quickly walked past the lounge in the ward, he noticed Lee Byung-chul sitting there.

“Mr. Patient!”

“Aren’t you the director [hospital director]?”

“What are you doing here?”

“Pardon?”

“I went to your room to see you, and you weren’t there. Do you know how worried I was?”

“Why? Did you think I ran away again?”

Lee Byung-chul, with a nonchalant expression, looked at Taekyung sitting across from him and said.

“I thought you ran away again.”

“Oh, my! Doctor, really!”

“Why are you out of bed? How are you feeling?”

“I thought you were just a doctor who appeared on TV with a fancy face, but you’re not ordinary at all.”

“Excuse me?”

Instead of answering whether he was in pain, he gave an absurd reply.

“The people in the same room told me. They said our director is a renowned doctor who cares about his patients’ hearts and that I had a successful surgery.”

“Is that so? That’s too much praise, isn’t it?”

“Perhaps it’s because a skilled person performed the surgery, but the surgical site is fine. Now that I think about it, I didn’t properly thank you earlier. Thank you for the successful surgery.”

Perhaps because he had undergone surgery, Lee Byung-chul, who had been stubbornly persistent, seemed a little softened.

“You asked why I was out here, right? I just came out because I felt a bit stuffy. And to be honest, I was thinking about running away.”

“Yes? No, if you keep doing that, I’ll call security and have them watch you 24 hours a day. I’m not kidding, you can’t run away until you’re discharged.”

It was not a joke at all. Hearing him openly say that he was going to run away, Taekyung seriously considered calling Jang Deuk-chil to stand guard next to his bed at all times.

“Don’t worry. I’m not thinking about it now.”

“Really?”

“Of course. Where else would I find a doctor who would chase after someone like me?”

“Mr. Patient, that hospital where you had surgery before…”

“Yes.”

“You ran away from that hospital, didn’t you?”

“Ah, no. How did you…… How did you know that? Did you call the hospital where I had surgery?”

“Of course not. I don’t know which hospital you had surgery at.”

Taekyung figured Lee Byung-chul had run away from the previous hospital based on his behavior so far.

From the moment he heard about his situation from Lee Chan-hee the day before, he thought something was strange.

It was ironic that someone who had surgery at a large hospital had run away while receiving treatment in the emergency room.

If it was confirmed that Lee Byung-chul was homeless, the hospital would have given him a sufficient explanation regarding the hospital bill.

Then, he should have known that he didn’t have to worry about the hospital bill and shouldn’t have thought about running away after treatment in the emergency room.

Rather, he would have responded to the treatment more confidently and actively.

Above all, it was quite unnatural when Taekyung explained it when he was caught in front of the convenience store at dawn.

‘Mr. Patient, did you have surgery at a big hospital and pay the hospital bill? You didn’t, did you?’

‘Yes!? Ah, yes, yes…….’

Lee Byung-chul’s expression, stammering at that question, was as if he was telling all the answers.

“I, actually, ran away from the previous hospital the day before I was discharged.”

“Why did you run away?”

“That’s…… I was embarrassed.”

Lee Byung-chul, who had been stubbornly brazen, trailed off, uncharacteristically, and asked a very primal question.

“Doctor, I’m dirty and smelly, right?”

“No. I don’t really notice.”

Taekyung, who lived surrounded by the smells of patients, was more accustomed to various smells than anyone else. As a result, he didn’t mind most smells.

Lee Byung-chul, being homeless, didn’t have the neat appearance of ordinary people, but he wasn’t someone who emitted a smell that made you frown.

At least, that’s how it was for Taekyung.

“You’re quite unique, doctor.”

Looking at Taekyung, who answered nonchalantly, Lee Byung-chul gave an awkward smile and explained why he ran away.

“While I was in the hospital room after surgery at the previous hospital, I actually felt a bit uncomfortable.”

As a homeless man living on the streets, the basic necessities of life that ordinary people took for granted were not available to him.

His main diet consisted of free meals or bread distributed by organizations, and he could only wash intermittently in the early morning, avoiding people’s eyes.

All he could do was rummage through medical collection boxes and change his clothes every season. Naturally, he couldn’t help but smell.

Lee Byung-chul thought of himself as a homeless man who had failed in society and was not proud of it.

As a result, when he was in pain, all he could do was stubbornly endure it until he got better.

There were more homeless people than you might think who couldn’t open their eyes in the morning and became cold corpses.

Homeless people couldn’t go to places where people naturally went. He knew that people’s eyes were not kind.

The hospital was the same. But after enduring it for a long time, he was in so much pain that a young man working as a public service worker at the subway station, whom he usually greeted, took him to the hospital.

‘Mister! You’re doing this again. Come to the hospital with me today. Okay?’

‘It’s okay. I’m fine.’

‘What do you mean, you’re fine? I called 119 [Korean emergency services number, like 911], so please bear with it a little longer.’

With the help of the kind young man, he had surgery at the hospital and was recovering.

One day, several days later, he was talking on the phone with the young man who had helped him on the hospital stairs when he overheard something.

‘I don’t know! How long has it been since he washed? He smells like sewage…… I feel like I’m going to throw up.’

He heard the words of the young doctor who always followed his professor and was in charge of him.

‘Yeah. I’m dying. At first, I didn’t want to accept him because he was homeless in the ER, but the head of the department told me to treat him and publish a feel-good article.’

The hospital, which had a medical accident last year, was doing various good deeds to improve its image, and Lee Byung-chul, a homeless man, was one such case.

‘Honey? You know what’s funny? They gave that homeless man a private room because he smelled, and other patients might complain. But he didn’t even know it and was smiling like an idiot. If you don’t have money, you should at least have pride. I don’t know why he’s like that.’

The moment he heard the doctor’s true feelings, who had been smiling warmly and worrying about him every time they met, his face flushed, and he couldn’t bear the shame.

In the end, Lee Byung-chul ran away that night, the day before his discharge.

“Actually, it’s not wrong, but after hearing those words, I was too embarrassed to face the doctors and nurses, and I felt like they were all cursing me in their hearts. In the end, I wondered what would happen if they asked me to pay the hospital bill, so I just left.”

No one in this world had pushed him to become homeless. It was a petty sense of inferiority, but even on the streets, he had some pride left.

“Why did you become homeless?”

Taekyung, who had been listening to the story, was curious as to why he had become homeless.

“Me? It’s obvious. A series of business failures led to constant arguments with my wife, and we divorced, and I’m living like this. I want to see my children, but I can’t contact them because I’m not proud of myself. People like you, Director, who have succeeded, may not know, but people like me are just living because we can’t die.”

“Mr. Lee Byung-chul?”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t it hard to live like this?”

“It’s hard. But if a person keeps failing, they give up at some point. Then, I don’t know what to do or how to do it, and I’m scared……”

“If you keep giving up, nothing will change. And you just said that I have a successful life, why did you say that?”

Taekyung’s tone rose slightly at Lee Byung-chul’s frustrating words.

“Because you make a lot of money.”

“Well, I don’t think a successful life is about making a lot of money, but about being proud of yourself. Giving up is also a habit if you keep doing it.”

“……!”

“How about trying one more time, even if you’re scared?”

“……Challenge?”

“Here! Take this.”

Taekyung handed Lee Byung-chul the thin booklet he was holding.

“What is this?”

“An opportunity to help you be proud of yourself.”

He opened the booklet he received and looked inside, realizing that it was a booklet to help homeless people become self-sufficient.

Lee Byung-chul immediately knew why he had been given this booklet.

Taekyung had been steadily purchasing booklets that helped homeless and marginalized people from a long time ago.

The content was informative, but above all, he liked the fact that homeless people and others in need were directly selling them for self-reliance.

Yesterday, after operating on Lee Byung-chul and entering the examination room, this booklet, which was on his desk, caught his eye, and he ended up giving it to him.

“You are responsible for your own life, not anyone else. I hope you live a better life than you do now.”

That was all Taekyung could do.

It was Lee Byung-chul’s choice whether to take courage for a better life or to continue living as a homeless man after giving up everything.

“Go back to your room and rest. And just in case, I’m saying this, but even if you run away, get all your treatment first. Then I won’t catch you.”

“I’m not going to run away. Director!”

Lee Byung-chul shouted loudly at Taekyung, who was leaving the lounge.

“I’m not going to run away. And thank you for this.”

He waved the booklet in his hand and said goodbye.

It was the first sincerity that Lee Byung-chul, who had been begging for coins and money that had fallen on the subway floor for 10 years, had ever felt.

He wanted to repay the sincerity that Taekyung, who had nothing to do with him, had sent. He wanted to take courage to live an ordinary life.

“Thank you so much, doctor.”

“Okay. I’ll see you again on the next round.”

Taekyung smiled and left the lounge, hoping that Lee Byung-chul’s resolution was not just a momentary feeling, and went down the stairs.

“D, Director?”

As he came down to the first floor, Team Leader Choi approached him as if he was glued to him.

“Team Leader, what’s wrong?”

“Shorten your rounds a bit. Once you go out…… This isn’t important right now. Go to the cafeteria quickly. You have a guest.”

“A guest in the cafeteria?”

Taekyung, who rarely had anyone visit him except for patients coming for treatment, was puzzled by the word ‘guest’ and headed to the cafeteria. A guest in the cafeteria, what could that mean?

“Hey, Director Kim!”

As he was looking around, an unexpected person sitting at a table inside the cafeteria called out to Taekyung.

“Here, here!”

“What brings you here at this hour, Chairman?”

The person who came without any notice was Nuga Group Chairman Kim Gun-hyung.