Seo Woo-jin wonders what he's going to do -- all the notebooks are named "The Cornered Stone Project." does he have to read every article in every book? Fortunately, by this time in his work in Doldam Hospital, he has connected with three others, and together they start to work on the problem. One points out that the notebooks have different annotations, "GS" for General Surgery, "CS" for Cardiovascular Surgery, etc. "Dr. Kim said it didn't involve surgery, so we can eliminate those," the colleague suggests. This boils it down to one notebook -- Neurology -- and it is almost immediately obvious what Dr. Kim's diagnosis is -- I'm so indoctrinated in HIPPA that I feel like I can't say it here. But Seo Woo-jin goes back to Dr. Kim and shares what he's found, which is, indeed correct.
We also learn what "The Cornered Stone Project" is -- it is the effort of the hospital to reflect on every case, learning from experience what succeeded and what might be done better. Throughout the series Dr. Kim has "known" things that others didn't -- he says it's not intuition, it's unceasing study. Young Dr. Seo is invited to join the project, helping the hospital perfect its ability to serve.
I don't know anything about Go, called "Baduk" in Korea, but I have seen baduk played in a number of K-dramas. I know that a "cornered stone" is one that is surrounded by the opposition. In Captivating the King, the fate of a Cornered Stone is a point of contention between the King and his gidaeryeong, Kang Mong-woo. The position of gidaeryeong is that of personal baduk opponent for the king. While the King is willing to sacrifice the cornered stone, Kang Mong-woo says that the cornered stone can always be saved, if you pay attention, and that this is the surer road to victory.
I feel deep kinship with Dr. Kim in this -- we are all cornered stones at this moment, and finding solutions requires unceasing study and practice, a constant iterative search for what can work. As a psychiatrist, I have been engaged in similar work, watching the constantly changing landscape of poor and working class communities, and searching for interventions that can stabilize us. While the threats I've been watching over the years yield pride of place to climate change, the scale of terror and inertia grow. Can we find a way to get people to give up carbon? I don't know, but I know that my colleagues and I will continue our own "cornered stone project" in a search for answers.
No comments:
Post a Comment