Coworkers {Soojung & Qian}
Soojung doesn’t like surprises. In fact, she is sure that no one else does either. Society would be perfectly content knowing that their daily mundane and relatively safe lives would never be interrupted by something out of the ordinary. But Fate plays a cruel little game, and every now and again, the young doctor will find herself tangled within the unexpected.
As a child, she was trained to work as a team; nobody could do anything alone. But over the course of many years outside of the the military zones, Soojung learned something different - how to be a lone wolf. Nobody trusted anyone in fear of betrayal or deceit. Why should they have anyway? Most of the kind-hearted people were either dead or infected.
So the young doctor would open her partner’s medical file, Song Qian. The fact that the hospital would expend two of their doctors and assign them to one patient was rare. The patient had better been damned sick. Soojung shifted her attention from Qian’s file to the patients. Medical records had shown that he had never received medical care before since the infection had first broken out. Symptoms included excessive convulsions, foaming at the mouth, and violent behaviour. It was quite typical of patients with mental illness to exhibit these symptoms. But what caught her eye was the blood tests. The results were too similar to a specific condition. It couldn’t be.
Soojung sprints down the stairs, running towards the patient’s room with relatively speed before flinging the door open. As expected, Qian her partner is already there and is inspecting the patient at a distance. "Doctor Song, you need to take a look at this." Soojung hands the file over. "The potassium and nitrogen levels in his blood are too high. You know these conditions as well as I do." she continued. The amount of nutrients in the blood were acting as a catalyst for fungal or algae growth. "We need to make an incision and check the blood colouring just to make sure." the young doctor approaches the convulsing patient now, positioning herself over his foot before she looks at her partner once more.
"Doctor Song, Number 11. Scalpel."
The moment she heard the news from the stranger, she immediately backed away from the body. She took the file from her hands and inspected the charts. It was strangely higher than other tests they had ran on others. These were indications of a fungal growth taking process in its body right now. The doctor was right. She knew the results just as well as she did. It wasn't new information for her. Learning the science of the the growth when she was with her father, she could memorize each step and recite it to a random person perfectly. After all, especially in the living conditions they were experiencing right now, it would be wise to learn the biology behind the infected.
Nodding to the doctor, she turned around where a table with tools stood behind her. She handed her the scalpel, anxious to see the results herself. She had rarely encountered a person who was this far into the process of the fungal growth. And when she did, she had no choice but to put an end to the poor soul's life. "Why don't we just kill him, doctor?" she questioned, placing the file on the counter top where the rest of the tools were. "Besides, you know it as well as I do, he won't survive either way. The fungi is most likely growing inside his body as we're talking right now. It'll just be mere hours until he'll attack on us,"
