My name is Michael Lee. And just now, I'm about to lose my life. Yeah, you heard that right. I'm dying.
I'm lying in a pool of blood. My blood, of course. And it won't stop pouring from my chest. All I can feel is this unbearable pain.
My vision is fading. Everything looks blurry as my life flashes before my eyes.
Memories I had forgotten, buried deep in my heart, start reliving. They play in my head like a movie reel.
My youth was the best time of my life. I went through high school with a bunch of friends and even had a girlfriend. Never once did I experience bullying.
Everything went smoothly, probably because I was the smartest kid in class. In fact, I aced the SAT with the highest score in South Korea. Of course, that achievement made it easy to get into any university I wanted.
Since I was born into a poor family, I decided to go to med school. I planned to go into dermatology and make a lot of money from it.
But somehow, I changed my mind. I decided to become a general surgeon, even though most people avoided it. Maybe because I was young and dumb.
Nevertheless, I put all my effort into mastering surgery. Because I knew that one small mistake would send my patients to their deaths.
Turns out, it wasn't as hard as I thought.
Thanks to my skills, I landed a job at the best private hospital, St. Hopkins Memorial. It only took me five years to perform my first surgery, while most other surgeons needed seven. That earned me a lot of popularity among the hospital staff.
At first, I loved it. Who wouldn't enjoy being the center of attention? But little did I know, that was the beginning of my downfall.
Back then, I was naive enough to believe that a doctor's main duty was to save patients. However, the hospital wasn't much different from the political world. It was all about power and money.
My growing popularity caught the eye of a doctor who was also the director. He treated me well, even introduced me to his daughter, and we eventually got engaged. He also promised me the head surgeon position.
But, of course, his kindness came with strings attached. I started becoming his dog. At first, I was handling VVIP patients, which was great.
But as time passed, I began performing surgeries under other doctors' names. They took all the credit for my hard work.
Of course, I questioned the director's decisions, but he always said, "Your time will come one day," and like an idiot, I believed him.
I performed thousands of surgeries like a tireless horse. I even handed in a few of my own research papers under his name.
Before I knew it, five years had passed, and I was still his loyal dog. The only reason I stuck around was his daughter, my fiancée. She was like my oasis in the middle of a desert.
I was head over heels in love with her. And she loved me too—or at least I thought she did.
At one point, I got sick of the director, and I decided to defy his orders for the first time.
A massive fire broke out in a district in Seoul, but by some miracle or coincidence, there was only one victim, an eight-year-old boy.
At the same time, there was a car accident. And the victim wasn't just anyone. It was the Mayor of Seoul.
They both arrived at the hospital almost at the same time. The kid came in five minutes earlier, unconscious. No burns on his skin, but he had bruises on his chest. After checking, we found he had internal thoracic bleeding.
Something must've hit him while he tried to escape the flames. The kid really needed surgery right away.
It was midnight. There were only two surgeons available. The director ordered me to operate on the Mayor. His condition wasn't much different from the kid's.
But I didn't follow the director's orders. I chose to operate on the kid, and the surgery went as smoothly as ever. The Mayor, though? He died on the table.
His death became big news. Thousands of media outlets were all over St. Hopkins Memorial's failure to save such an important figure in Seoul. Criticism and hate poured in from all sides, and the director took the brunt of it. Some of the VVIP patients even started switching to other hospitals.
I didn't expect things to get this bad just because of one simple choice.
A week after the chaos settled down, the director called me into his office. I still remember what he said to me.
"You're an ungrateful dog, Michael. I had high hopes for you, and you let me down."
That's all he said. I felt relieved because I thought he was going to fire me. It turned out that what I got was worse.
The days that followed were pure hell. I got reassigned to the ER, working alongside interns. I was also put in charge of operating on patients with less than a 30% success rate. My clean record of no deaths on the table was ruined.
A few months later, the director was promoted to the board of directors. Instead of making me head surgeon, he promoted some other doctor who wasn't even half as skilled as me.
And right around the same time, my fiancée, the only reason I kept going, suddenly dumped me. She just said, "You're an idiot, Michael. You're not the man I want to marry anymore."
Other staff members started avoiding me for some reason. They wouldn't even say hi back when I greeted them. I had no reason to stick around anymore.
I decided to quit and start a new life. But every hospital I applied to turned me down because of the bad reports from my previous job.
Even after leaving the hospital, his shadow still followed me.
Since then, my life went off the rails. I started spending my days drinking, hoping to forget the bitter reality. Who would've thought I'd be falling apart in my quarter-life crisis?
One night, on my way back from the bar, I saw a bright light. Drunk, I thought it was the light of an angel coming for me. The light got brighter as it drew closer.
"Oh, God! Please! Save me!"
But it wasn't an angel. It was a truck. My body got thrown three meters back when the truck hit me.
THUD! That's how it sounds.
Blood gushed out of my mouth, my head, my nose. My whole body felt shattered until all that was left was the tightness in my chest.
And here I am, reflecting on my short and boring life, like a commercial break.
Dying, powerless. I close my eyes, hoping another life after death is better than this. And if another life really exists, I swear I won't live under someone else's control ever again.