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CH3 | DI
🕑 Added 2025-01-26 06:40:00 +0000 UTCA lump, swollen and protruding around the jawline and beneath the ear.
The lymph nodes were swollen.
‘Is my immune system weakened?’
When immunity weakens, inflammation can occur, and that can cause the lymph nodes to swell.
Lymph nodes are places where immune cells gather.
Come to think of it, I had been feeling extremely fatigued lately.
I was falling asleep during the day, and suddenly my hands and feet would lose strength.
‘Let’s go to bed early today.’
I made up my mind, washed my feet, and lay down in bed, but in the middle of the night, I suddenly woke up.
“Jesus!”
A terrifying abdominal pain, like my intestines were being torn apart.
Tiny red spots appeared on my arms.
Cold sweat was pouring down from my entire body.
I barely managed to call 911.
I was rushed to the emergency room.
***
"The ultrasound is fine. But the blood test…"
"What the… Why are the numbers like this? Does a CRP of 300 even make sense?"
"Run it again!"
"What about the CT scan? …The lymph nodes all over the body… Could it be blood cancer…Fluid is accumulating in the heart and lungs…"
Even in my delirium, I knew the situation was bad.
The medical staff were running a barrage of tests, trying to figure out if it was cancer, an infection, or a virus.
Meanwhile, my condition kept deteriorating.
The pain was so intense that flashes of light appeared before my eyes.
The agony pierced to my bones, shredding my sanity.
"Multiple system organ failure"
That meant all my organs had failed.
"Liver, kidneys, heart, all of them…"
Every single organ in my body had declared a strike.
"Doctor! The biopsy results!…"
"Oh, for heaven’s sake…Administer VDT-ACER immediately…"
Even in my hazy consciousness, I understood that.
It was a powerful chemotherapy drug.
The order was to gather all the strongest chemotherapy drugs, make a 7-drug cocktail, and spray it into my body.
There was no way to stop this madness.
So they decided to wipe out every cell and reset everything.
Beep, beep, beepᅳ
Thankfully, it worked.
A few days later, I regained consciousness and finally learned my diagnosis.
“You have idiopathic multicentric Castleman’s disease.”
“Wait, what did you say?”
“Idiopathic multicentric Castleman’s disease, or iMCD.”
Even as a medical school graduate and a bio-investment specialist, I had never heard of this disease.
That meant it was rare.
“Is it cancer?”
“It’s not cancer, but it shares many similarities with lymphoma……”
“Then is it an immune system disease?”
“It exhibits symptoms similar to immune system diseases, but it hasn’t been classified etiologically yet, so…”
Apparently, it’s one of those rare diseases that only affects 5,200 people in the U.S. every year, and I was one of the unlucky ones.
On top of that, there are various subtypes of this disease, and the subtype I had affects only 2,200 people a year.
“Idiopathic means… idiopathic, right?”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
In medical terms, it means ‘we don’t know.’
“Let me borrow my phone for a moment…”
I am a medical graduate, after all.
I didn’t have the strength to do much, but I could at least move my fingers, so I did some research.
‘Damn.’
I probably shouldn’t have.
This is a nightmare with no hope or dreams.
Let me simplify this to the extreme.
The lymph nodes are factories that produce immune cells.
But my immune factory has a ‘crazy’ switch.
When this ‘crazy’ switch is flipped, the ‘crazy’ sequence kicks in, and suddenly the factory goes berserk, mass-producing faulty immune cells.
These crazed cells are completely reckless.
They attack everything because they don’t know what to target.
As these cells roam around my body and recklessly attack perfectly healthy organs, the organs can’t take it and declare a strike.
The most important thing here is the “crazy” switch.
We need to figure out what turns this switch on.
We also need to find out how to turn it off once it’s on.
If we can just figure that out, we can cure the disease.
But because we don’t know, it’s called idiopathic, meaning we have no idea.
‘For now, is chemotherapy the only option?’
When an episode occurs, we administer a powerful chemotherapy drug that wipes out all the cells and resets everything.
That wipes out the crazy cells in one go, but it also wipes out the healthy cells.
If I repeat this a few more times, I’ll die.
To survive, we have to fix the factory…
We need to find the switch and prevent it from being turned on.
“Clinical trials…”
My mouth was dry.
Clinical trials are for desperate people who volunteer to be lab rats.
I never thought I’d be in this position.
“Are there any ongoing clinical trials?”
“There are two, but they haven’t been proven effective for your subtype, Siheon…”
Having even two options for such a rare disease is something.
One was an IL-6 inhibitor, and the other was an mTOR inhibitor.
I tried both.
***
“Patient crashing! Hurry! Code blue!”
They didn’t work.
My body continued to have episodes, and each time they reset me with a nuclear bomb of chemo, and after about three rounds, my kidneys gave out.
“You need dialysis. At this rate, you’ll need a transplant, but…”
Who would give a transplant to someone who keeps having episodes?
I had to give up on that.
‘This is a nightmare…’
I was gradually losing my human form.
When the kidneys fail, the body swells.
That’s because it can’t store fluid in the right places.
Soon, I became a giant human water balloon.
Water sloshed under my skin, and I was closer to a water balloon than a human.
Before long, my stomach and intestines also declared their retirement after being poisoned one by one.
In the end, I lost all bodily functions and had to rely on machines.
But that wasn’t the real problem.
“Is there really no other option?”
I can endure the pain.
I can accept becoming a monster.
As long as there is hope.
“I’ll give you as much money as you need, anything…”
There are only two known treatments.
And neither of them stopped my episodes.
That means neither of them blocks my crazy switch.
I need to try another inhibitor.
But the doctor just lowered his head.
“I’m sorry, but those two are all we have for this disease.”
“Even if it’s just starting clinical trials, that’s fine. As long as it’s passed animal testing, I’ll be your lab rat. Just… anything… anything at all…”
“I’m really sorry.”
“I don’t care if the odds are slim. I’m not asking for optimization, even if it’s just at the compound screening or target validation stage…”
“……”
The doctor couldn’t continue, head hung low.
‘Nothing.’
The stages I just mentioned are all preclinical.
I asked if there were any drugs in line for clinical trials, but there were none.
There are no treatments for my disease.
And there won’t be any in the future.
‘Damn.’
In truth, I already knew this.
I’m a professional in this field, after all.
Let’s crunch some numbers.
The average cost of a clinical trial for an immune disease is $4.5 billion.
Even with all that effort, statistically, only 12% of new drugs get final approval from the FDA.
That’s about one success for every ten attempts.
So, how much would it cost to develop a cure for this disease?
If I’m lucky and succeed on the first try, $4.5 billion.
If I’m unlucky and need ten tries…clinical trials alone would cost $45 billion, and if you include the development costs, it’s roughly $50 billion.
That’s about 66 trillion Korean won.
So, what’s the expected profit?
My subtype affects 2,200 patients in the U.S. annually.
How long would it take to recoup the $50 billion investment from them?
The answer is zero.
There’s no investment.
Would you invest in something that can’t even recover its original cost, let alone make a profit?
There’s no investment money.
So there are no people researching this disease or developing treatments.
These kinds of abandoned diseases are collectively called “orphan diseases.”
“Ugh, I hate this!”
The sudden voice grated against every nerve in my body.
It felt like sharp shards of glass were being thrown at my mind, not my body.
“Let’s get up!”
“Work, work!”
The voice, unlike before, now sounded vivid.
This is… the voice of my intern.
‘Was that a dream?’
At some point, I must have dozed off.
I had just made a proper journey into the past and returned.
Maybe this is what people mean by ‘life flashing before your eyes.’
In reality, I was lying in a hospital bed, and the young people chatting were now stretching and leaving the room.
“Got to make money, money!”
“Hey, don’t you get it? Money? It’s pointless, no matter how much you earn!”
Surely, they’re not talking about me, right?
If they are, they’re dead wrong.
Because my problem can be solved with money.
I just need to scrape together 50 billion dollars and develop a cure myself.
‘…Ah.’
This is it.
Suddenly, all the pieces of my life’s puzzle clicked into place.
The reason I was drawn to being a doctor, despite it not being like me.
The reason I quit being a doctor and applied to Wall Street.
Even my strangely specific abilities.
All of it was to cure this disease.
If I had threaded the pieces together properly, I could’ve survived.
But it wasn’t just that.
My obsession with money.
The reason I was never satisfied, no matter how much I earned.
The reason my heart sank every time I withdrew cash…
Maybe, my cells had recognized this disease and were sending warnings, telling me I needed to earn more to survive.
But it’s already too late.
Today is the day I die.
How do I know?
There was no pain from the morning.
That means they injected a heavy dose of morphine.
The doctor’s final kindness to a patient on their last legs.
My lungs are already tightening.
Or perhaps it’s my blood vessels constricting.
Like a slowly closing faucet, the oxygen supply is being cut off.
Or maybe it’s the blood supply being shut off.
I’m dying now.
There’s no pain.
Oddly enough, I don’t even feel fear.
The only emotion I feel inside is one thing.
‘I could’ve earned more.’
An endless thirst.
***
Murmuring.
Squeak—
[Now, we will hear from the head of the Fixed Assets Division.]
The sound returned.
The faucet that had been shut off suddenly opened.
“Huuuhhh!!”
The sensation of oxygen rushing in all at once is almost shocking.
“Hu… hu… hu…”
I’m cold.
It’s because the sweat that soaked my entire body has cooled rapidly.
My heart is still racing.
‘I can… see?’
The black blotches that covered more than half my vision are gone.
“What’s with this guy?”
“Is he crazy?”
I turned my head toward the direction of the murmurs.
Young men dressed in suits like school uniforms were looking at me with contempt.
The emotions reflected in their pupils were superiority, mockery, disgust…
‘Wall Street?’
It’s clear.
These young men are the hopefuls of Wall Street.
They’ve strung together future financial villains like a chain of CDOs.
They’re not going to bundle me up and sell me off to the King of Hell, are they…?
[Goldman offers the opportunity to work alongside the people who move the world. You will be leading the grand movements that mark the end of the Wall Street Times…]
The man on stage was delivering familiar lines.
From now on, you will do important work.
Work that moves the world economy.
You’ll build connections with key people from giant corporations, and so on.
All bait to lure in first-year slaves.
You have to lay it down thick in the beginning, so they don’t run away.
All of this feels too real.
And, strangely human.
Which means…
‘This isn’t hell.’
I fumbled in my pocket and found something solid.
An iPhone.
But the screen was so small, it made me want to scream.
– September 10, 2013
It’s a date from 10 years ago.
I tried entering the passcode.
– 0418
My mom’s birthday.
I’ve used the same code for 20 years, so if this is really my phone, it should work.
The lock screen opened.
I went into settings, and it said iPhone 5.
‘This feels oddly real.’
Based on the evidence so far, I’ve gone back to the past.
10 years ago, the year I joined Wall Street.
So this place is…
‘The last day of training?’
Every employee who joins Goldman goes through 6 weeks of training.
Come to think of it, I recall some higher-ups visiting on the last day of training.
The face of the man speaking in front of me felt familiar.
‘Is this really the past, or another life-flashing moment?’
I want to see a mirror.
If it’s 10 years ago, my face should look quite youthful.
Then, suddenly, an alarm went off in my mind.
“Don’t move!”
A sharp memory, rising like a spike, emerged from a blurry recollection.
If this really is 2013, that day…
Soon, ‘that incident’ will happen.
It’s better to confirm the incident than to look at a mirror.
For now… let’s wait.
