The Night Shift
夜勤の一夜
The moment the ambulance doors burst open, Kenji knew the night would not be an easy one.
A man in his fifties lay on the , his face pale and slick with cold sweat.
The paramedics reported that he had collapsed suddenly while walking home from a late dinner.
His blood pressure was dangerously low, and his raced far beyond any healthy rhythm.
Kenji had worked the emergency ward for nine years, yet each case still tightened his chest.
Scanning the monitors quickly, he began to build a picture from the fragments before him.
The patient could barely speak, murmuring only that a sharp pain had torn through his belly.
There was no family present, no medical history, and no time to wait for answers.
In the emergency room, information is always incomplete, and itself can cost a life.
Kenji pressed gently on the man's , watching his face with each careful touch.
Several conditions could explain the symptoms, and some of them were within the hour.
Ordering a full scan would take time that the patient's failing body might not have.
Yet acting without certainty meant risking a decision he could never afterward take back.
The young nurse beside him waited, her eyes moving between the monitor and his face.
"We may not have long," she said quietly, voicing the fear he already carried.
Kenji weighed the signs the way a sailor reads a darkening sky before a storm.
Every pointed toward a somewhere deep inside, bleeding where no eye could see.
Had he been wrong about the source, the treatment itself might do terrible harm.
He thought of the countless patients whose lives had turned on a single midnight choice.
Medicine, he had learned long ago, was rarely a matter of clean and certain answers.
Taking a slow breath, he ordered the team to prepare the patient for surgery.
The nurse nodded and moved at once, relieved that a direction had finally been set.
As the rolled toward the operating room, Kenji stayed a moment in the silence.
He knew that a single judgment, made in seconds, could follow a doctor for years.
Somewhere in the building, a clock ticked toward the hour that would change everything.
What he could not yet know was how heavily this night would one day weigh.