Once the two left, the world was quiet.
Taesu slowly lay down on the hospital bed and savored the stillness.
“An emergency, huh. What a shame.”
The words he uttered and the faint smile on his face did not suit each other at all.
Lately, there hadn’t been a single day when his ears were at peace.
That was why this moment felt so precious.
Like anyone else, there were times when Taesu wanted to dig himself a cave.
It was time to put himself back in order before returning to his main job.
That was exactly how Taesu felt right now.
Tap. Tap.
Lightly knocking his toes together, he let one thought after another drift through his mind.
It was just as Taesu was steeped in that silence. Unfortunately, it seemed he had chosen the wrong time.
As always, the hospital room door opened suddenly without warning.
Slide.
Nurse Navis came in through the open doorway.
Ever since the Bak Huinam incident, her brow had stayed furrowed whenever she looked at Taesu.
Since the fasting had failed and the examination schedule had been thrown off, she must have been scolded quite badly.
But not now.
She came over in quick little steps and greeted him warmly with a bright smile.
“Dr. Choe, how are you feeling? Is resting uncomfortable?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Did you cause another accident behind my back?”
“No. No, I didn’t. But what brings you here?”
Taesu asked, flinching for no reason.
Nurse Navis knew why he was reacting that way, but she seemed willing to let it pass.
“I came to bring you good news.”
“What kind of news?”
“You’ve been through so much. So, so, so much.”
Nurse Navis offered the words with genuine emotion.
It came out of nowhere, but Taesu caught on immediately.
“I’m being discharged?”
“Finally.”
“Ah, I’m finally being discharged?”
When Taesu corrected himself, Nurse Navis grew even more moved.
“Exactly. The day we despaired would never come has come at last.”
“Hahaha.”
“The surgical nurses’ station is in a festive mood right now. We’re even planning a party to celebrate Dr. Choe’s discharge.”
“You don’t have to go that far for me.”
The moment Taesu answered glibly, Nurse Navis wiped the smile clean off her face and grumbled.
“Go that far? Do you have any idea how much we’ve suffered because of you all this time……?”
Chatter, chatter.
Nurse Navis’s nagging began at last.
When he put it all together, there had been quite a number of incidents.
Summarized, they were major events, but when one dug into the details, there was a lot.
On top of that, he knew the internal circumstances so well that even when he caused trouble, most cases were awkward to confront him about.
As Taesu quietly listened to her nagging, he tried putting himself in their shoes.
If a patient like that were discharged?
‘I think I’d be happy too.’
He understood completely.
So he listened thoroughly and without resistance to Nurse Navis’s final lecture.
But there was a small twist.
“……Everyone was worried about you, Dr. Choe, running around all over the place like that.”
“Pardon?”
“I said all the nurses were worried. You should have waited until you were better before moving around. If you’d really made it worse and needed another surgery, you would have gone straight to the ICU!”
Nurse Navis answered, enunciating each word sharply.
At the sudden concern, Taesu was a little flustered.
“You kept scolding me like that, and now you suddenly say this? I can’t keep up.”
“It’s true that we worried a lot.”
“I know. It’s not as if you nagged because you hated me.”
“When you gave emergency treatment to Dr. Hanks, I really did nag because I hated you.”
Nurse Navis answered with a sullen face.
Taesu didn’t believe her.
“That just means you were that worried.”
“I said I hated you.”
“Once I’m discharged, I’ll be returning to the front lines, so please be a little gentler with me.”
Taesu pleaded in a pitiful voice.
But Nurse Navis’s expression grew sharper instead.
“Because you’re a doctor, is that it?”
“Not at all.”
“It doesn’t matter anyway. With Dr. Choe’s skills, it’ll still be hard for you to come into headquarters.”
It was a sudden, brutally honest jab.
Taesu placed a hand on his chest and made a tearful face.
“Ugh. That one cut too deep.”
“But you never know. You can’t judge a person only by skill.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m saying Dr. Choe has other weapons too. And among them, the scariest weapon would be this.”
Rustle.
Nurse Navis took something out of her coat pocket.
They were envelopes of varying sizes and shapes.
When she held them out, Taesu pointed at himself.
“For me?”
“Yes. Fan letters.”
“Then…… there aren’t enough.”
When Taesu made a joke at that moment, Nurse Navis furrowed her brow.
“Even when I say something nice, you have to twist it.”
“If they were really fan letters, you should have given them to me earlier. Do you know how long I’ve been hospitalized here?”
“That was up to me.”
Nurse Navis answered in a sullen voice.
Taesu was honestly dumbfounded.
But after thinking it over for a moment, Taesu realized something.
“I’ve only just gotten a bit of free time now.”
“I told you, I hid them on purpose.”
“Let’s say that’s true. In any case, thank you for handing them over instead of swallowing them whole.”
Taesu added the joke as he thanked her.
Perhaps she didn’t entirely dislike that easygoing humor, because Nurse Navis also set aside her prickliness.
“Enough. Take your time reading them, then come out…… And nurses like doctors who receive fan letters more than doctors who are simply skilled.”
“I like all the nurses, though.”
“I know. Well then.”
Slide.
Unlike when she had come in, Nurse Navis quietly left the hospital room.
Taesu smiled softly.
The nagging and bickering had gone back and forth without pause, but within them, sincerity had been there too.
That was enough.
The thought lasted only a moment, and Taesu began examining the envelopes.
Rustle, rustle.
The addresses, names, and even the stamps were all in Hindi.
But among them, he found one written in English.
The sender was?
Taesu’s eyes widened.
“Hanks!”
It was a letter from Dr. Hanks.
The shape of the envelope, rich with a British feel, gave off a strong sense of trust.
Taesu opened that letter first.
Rrrip!
Inside were a thick bundle of letter paper and several photographs.
Taesu looked at the photographs first.
The moment he saw the first photo, Taesu’s chest grew warm.
But Dr. Hanks was not in the photograph.
It contained only the backs of three children who looked like teenagers. They were by a riverside, laughing as if they had discovered something.
Taesu knew instinctively.
“He took this himself.”
There was no doubt that Dr. Hanks had captured the happiness he was feeling now in that photograph.
And he could also feel the complicated, subtle emotions of someone watching over the children.
The next photo showed them all eating barbecue together.
The first thing that caught his eye was Dr. Hanks, looking even more gaunt than before.
He could not enjoy the meat with the children.
Because most of his pancreas had been removed through surgery, it was impossible for him to digest meat.
Even as he replaced the meal with bottled patient nutrition, Dr. Hanks’s face, full of smiles, left a deep impression.
All the other photos also contained small happiness from everyday life.
After looking through all the photographs, Taesu unfolded the letter.
It had a truly peculiar feeling.
The handwriting was a child’s, but the content belonged to a mature adult.
“He must have had someone write it for him.”
That was written right after the greeting.
—The youngest has the best handwriting, so I asked him. Though I had to pay the price in ice cream.
The warmth he had felt in the photographs was melted into the letter as well.
The contents of the letter could be summarized surprisingly simply.
—I decided to write letters like this to the people who come to mind. Why Dr. Choe is the first, I’m not sure myself.
Taesu smiled softly.
“I know. I’m surprised I’m the first, too.”
Considering his life, the time they had met must have been but an instant.
Even so, perhaps he remained in Hanks’s memory because they had met most recently.
Line by line.
Taesu carefully read the letter with his eyes, one character at a time.
Within it, his wife and children appeared without fail.
Everything Dr. Hanks was seeing, feeling, and thinking now could be found in the contents of the letter.
And soon, he reached the end.
—I’ve decided not to check when my clock will stop. I’d rather spend the time taking one more walk with my children.
It meant he would not be receiving examinations at the hospital.
“Very right.”
Taesu strongly agreed with that point.
At this stage, getting examined was meaningless.
Rather than knowing and worrying, not knowing and enjoying would surely be much easier on the mind.
Then the next passage followed.
The handwriting in that sentence was extremely shaky.
It seemed the person taking dictation had been terribly shaken while writing it down.
—If I have one final wish, it’s that the sunlight be warm on the day of my funeral. If it rains, my wife and children might catch cold.
And I’m not inviting Dr. Choe. See patients during that time. Don’t come to see me.
What expression had he worn when he said those words?
Taesu dared to imagine it.
His lips must have trembled faintly, even as he smiled.
Taesu carefully pictured that expression as well.
It was just as he was about to put the letter away.
He saw writing showing through on the back page.
“Mm?”
Rustle.
When he turned it over, there was a postscript.
—P.S.
A true physician.
It’s a phrase I’ve carried for twenty years, but I still don’t know the answer. Since I’m busy, I hope Dr. Choe will continue searching for the answer in my place.
The moment he saw it, all of Dr. Hanks’s actions made sense.
He surely must have had the desire to stand proud as a father.
But the answer to twenty years of continuous service had been vague.
The answer was here.
—A true physician.
It was the path of a doctor that Caprene had pursued.
It seemed Dr. Hanks had defined its meaning as endless communication with patients.
There was no answer.
But it was certain that for twenty years, he had lived while admiring Caprene in his heart.
“Caprene, if Hanks goes there, at least give him a drink, as a fellow human being.”
Taesu did not know whether his request would reach the heavens.
But he did not attach deep meaning to it.
If it was Caprene, he might already know.
Then, for a moment, he calmly soothed his shaken heart.
Only after his heart settled did Taesu look at the other letters.
Rustle, rustle.
After flipping through a few, Taesu found another one in English.
The sender was?
“Liberio.”
He was a victim of the bus terror attack and a patient with severe complex burns.
More than that, there was a diagnosis that made Taesu remember him even more clearly.
—Amnesia.
Due to the destruction of brain cells from inhaling a large amount of fire smoke, his memories of the past had disappeared.
That had been his first dispatch after rappel training.
In terms of time, it had not been that long ago.
“Wasn’t he undergoing treatment here?”
That was how Taesu remembered it, but when he checked the country the letter had been sent from, it was entirely different.
Sweden.
For some reason, the country felt unfamiliar.
“Was he originally from there?”
He remembered the gist of the conversations he had shared with Liberio, but not the finer details.
That was not important.
The very fact that he had sent a letter like this was something to be grateful for.