It was nearing 6 a.m., and the hospital was still buzzing with its usual frantic energy. The air inside the on-call room smelled of stale coffee, and the floor was littered with energy bar wrappers. Dahyun sat in one of the chairs, slouched over, massaging her temples. Jihyo was passed out on the couch, snoring softly. Their night had been a whirlwind of chaos - Dahyun handling trauma patients in the ER and Jihyo taking the lead in two major surgeries.
The room was quiet, a momentary reprieve from the madness outside, until Jihyo's eyes fluttered open.
"Are we dead?" Jihyo asked groggily, lifting her head just enough to peek over at Dahyun.
"I wish," Dahyun muttered, stifling a yawn. "But, unfortunately, no. We're still stuck in this hell."
Jihyo chuckled and sat up, stretching out her stiff neck. "I mean, if this is hell, it's not so bad. At least it's interesting."
Dahyun's lips curled into a grin, her signature dark humor slipping through. "True. Can't argue with that. If we were actually dead, I'd want to be in a place where people keep coming in with ridiculous injuries. You know, for entertainment."
"Oh, you'd be the queen of hell," Jihyo said with a laugh, finally standing up and walking over to grab a bottle of water. "Just sitting there, making sarcastic comments as people walk in with their limbs falling off."
"And you'd be right beside me," Dahyun shot back, smirking. "Slicing open their organs and complaining about how bad they are at dying properly."
Jihyo choked on her water, laughing at the absurdity of it all. "Yeah, I could see that."
Their banter was like that-dark, sarcastic, and grounded in the morbid reality of their jobs. As much as they joked, they knew the truth: in this line of work, humor was their survival mechanism.
---
The day before had been brutal for both of them. Dahyun had dealt with a string of non-stop traumas in the ER, including a young man who had driven his motorcycle straight into a parked truck. Meanwhile, Jihyo had been called into back-to-back surgeries, one of which was a particularly nasty bowel obstruction that took hours to resolve.
As they sat in the on-call room, the weight of it all started to sink in.
"Do you ever feel like...this is too much?" Dahyun asked, leaning her head back against the wall and closing her eyes. "Like we're just patching people up only for them to come back broken again?"
Jihyo raised an eyebrow, her expression thoughtful. "Is this where I'm supposed to be inspirational and say something like, 'That's why we're here, to keep fixing them'? Because honestly, no. People are disasters. And if it weren't for the fact that I get to cut them open and fix them myself, I don't know if I could stand it."
Dahyun snorted. "Yeah, I figured you'd say something like that."
Jihyo gave her a half-smile. "But seriously, do you ever regret this? Medicine? All of it?"
Dahyun thought about it for a moment. There were times, especially during the night shifts from hell, where she did wonder if she'd chosen the wrong path. But then there were those rare moments-the ones where a patient pulled through, where they got to walk out of the hospital after days of uncertainty-that reminded her why she did this.
"I don't regret it," Dahyun said finally, her voice soft but certain. "I mean, sometimes I hate it. Sometimes I want to scream because the system is broken, and we're just here trying to fix something that's beyond repair. But at the end of the day, I don't regret it."
Jihyo nodded in agreement. "Yeah. I think that's how we all feel. I hate it sometimes, but it's the only thing I want to do. Nothing else makes sense."
---
