Chapter 8
The curse, the prince and the sorrowful eyes
"What you see now is not all of it."
Oon barked in the office room for neurology fellowship residents with a huge pile of patient files in his hands. Bang! All of them were dropped in front of me when he finally reached my desk.
"And there's this part that we need to study all of it."
My eyes were wide-open. How am I supposed to study that humongous piles of files all in one day? I was about to complain about it just before I caught on the corner of my eyes that all the fellowship residents in the department were digging their noses in the document and printing the EEG, the exact same thing I was doing. Also, there were patient files that weren't any thinner than mines laid bare in front of each of them.
Geez, no more complaint needed now. Everybody here shares the same fate.
I sighed -- a long sigh -- and then dug my nose in my files. The files, which I finished reading and printing the EEG, would be submitted to the senior resident for his help in reviewing to see if I interpreted the results completely as per standards. Then, it would be stamped by the department seal, put in the patient files and that was pretty much it. Since the files were about the interpretation of EEG, the graph itself could be up to a dozen pages just for only one case. After my attempts to finish just a few cases, the graph lines on the paper somehow imprinted on my eyes and it didn't disappear even if I blinked several times. What time is it now? I wondered. Woah, we had been working like hell for three consecutive hours. Maybe, it's time for a coffee break after all, I think.
Even if I was allocated to work outside my department, there was still work in this department that I needed to do and that was this EEG interpretation. If the piles in front of me were considered to be a lot of work, the pending cases -- those of the patients who would need to be examined by EEG but still had to wait -- were a lot more. Besides the complexity of interpretation, the machine was also so expensive that it was not something common in the hospitals. Even if a hospital managed to acquire such a machine, it would have been just a few, tops, while the number of patients that required such an examination were so many. It was pretty much something the hospital couldn't handle.
"It must be so good if we have a psychic power to see a patient's brain wave. We can just interpret it right away and don't have to wait in line. There's only one machine and it's something closer to a wreck." I told my wishful thinking to Oon and the other senior resident.
"It doesn't have to be a psychic power actually" The senior resident pulled off another case file and handed it to me.
"There is a case of a guy who could see such a thing just because he has a tumor on his retina."
"Woah, that's interesting." I really had never heard of such a case.
He nodded. "As we all know, the retina cells receive the energy, convert it into neural signals and send them to the brain. Light is a form of energy and electric waves are pretty much the same thing. If one's retina cells could receive a wider band of energy than the normal band that normal people's retina cells can receive, I think one could see the electric waves, magnetic waves or maybe something even weirder." Then he closed the file.
"Well, for your case, everything goes with your interpretation. There's nothing wrong. You can stamp the seal and send it out."
"Hey, my eyes are closing. Do you guys want to have some coffee?" Oon was the first one who got up and stretched himself. What he said must be something that was already in every mind in the room, since everybody nodded at him, put down the EEG graphs and followed his stretching.
YOU ARE READING
My imaginary boyfriend
Mystery / Thriller"If you leave it without saying goodbye, it will come back to deprive the life out of you." At first, Phai though that Klong was only his imaginary friend who stepped up to be an imaginary boyfriend. But seems like Klong doesn't want to be only imag...
