I Chose Not to Hide Anymore

It was a world I’d never seen up close. Students who’d topped their classes all over the country were suddenly in one room. It wasn’t just talent; the backgrounds were dazzling, too. Someone’s father ran a hospital. Someone else’s was a star professor. Even among the two of us from my rural high school who made it into Korea University College of Medicine, my friend’s father was a physician. I didn’t exactly envy them; it just felt like they’d arrived from a different world.

I had a more urgent worry anyway: I didn’t want anyone to know I’d had open-heart surgery. Not openly, not by accident. These people were training to be doctors; the idea that they might look me up in a textbook made my skin crawl.

That wasn’t just paranoia. I’d learned my lesson in high school after I returned from surgery. One kid thought it was funny to joke, “Hey, careful—what if Seung-geon’s heart stops?” Maybe he meant nothing by it, but I still remember the line—and his face.

I told my classmate from the same high school that I hoped no one at med school would find out. He was kind. He kept the secret, and he also dragged me to the gym whenever he could, building me up so that—if it ever did come out—I’d have the confidence to carry it.

I started medical school with a vow to start from zero and do things properly. The first test came fast: the makgeolli initiation. At Korea University there’s a rite, more tradition than rule. Our class of about 120 split into ten tables. At the front of each table sat a wide, stainless-steel bowl meant for naengmyeon—filled to the brim with milky rice wine. One student at a time would step forward, drain the bowl, tip it upside down over their head, and then seniors would hustle them to the bathroom to…undo it all.

The student president demonstrated, downing his bowl in seconds. The room roared. Then table by table, people went up. Some stalled midway, cheeks ballooned and hands clamped over mouths, but in the end everyone finished. Then it was my turn.

Up close, the bowl looked impossibly large. Can I actually do this? I didn’t have time to think. I lifted it with both hands and drank. The weight in my stomach rose, heavy and warm. Halfway through I had to stop for air. What if my stomach ruptures? I wanted to quit. But I could already imagine being the story people told for years. I set my jaw and finished. Then I ran to the bathroom and gave it all back, came out, and sang along with the “makgeolli chant” like I’d just passed a test.

The truth is I shouldn’t have been drinking at all. I was on warfarin, a blood thinner that keeps clots from forming on my mechanical valve. Warfarin is processed by the liver. So is alcohol. Put too much traffic on the same tiny road and everything backs up; the drug’s effect can spike, your blood won’t clot, and even a small cut can get dangerous.

But there’s no living college life without the occasional round. I never suggested after-parties, but I never refused an invitation either. If someone poured, I drank. Looking back, it was foolish and risky. But telling people why I shouldn’t drink felt harder. At the time, blending in mattered more than staying safe.

That was true in the classroom too. The six-year curriculum splits into two: two years of pre-med, then four of medicine proper. The first two years of med school are almost all theory—basic sciences like anatomy and pathology alongside clinical subjects like internal medicine and surgery. There’s a strict fail policy: even one F can cost you an entire year. It feels like being a high-school senior for two and a half years straight.

My goal was modest: land in the middle of the pack. Even that took everything. On the night before an exam my friends and I camped in the medical library, swearing we’d pull an all-nighter, only to end up ordering black-bean noodles at 2 a.m. and dozing off on the sofas. Students who stay up the night before a test rarely top the class; I was no exception. But I made it through in six years without failing. On graduation day, only about fifty of the 120 who’d started with me walked. “Middle of the pack” felt like an achievement.

All the while I kept hiding my surgery. I drank when everyone drank. I stayed up when everyone stayed up. Twice, though, the secret almost broke.

One night after a club event, we were tearing into fried chicken at a beer hall when a senior leaned over, eyes bright with gossip.

“I heard from a kid in another department who went to your high school—you had heart surgery, right?”

I tightened my face so nothing showed. I’d protected this secret for years; I wasn’t about to lose it over a casual question. I told myself, If I keep my wits about me, I’ll be fine, and answered as lightly as I could.

“Oh, that’s someone with a similar name. Happens all the time. Not me.”

I tossed in a small, specific detail to make it sound natural. Whether he believed me or not, I chose to believe he did. Maybe what I needed then wasn’t what others actually thought, but my belief that they thought it.

The other time blindsided me in a clinic. Even in college I visited the hospital every three months. I’d step into the exam room, the familiar professor would say, “Let’s have a listen,” and I’d lift my shirt while he placed his stethoscope and listened, head bowed, hair dusted with gray. He’d dictate a few instructions to the resident at the computer; keys would clack; then he’d turn back. “You’re fine. See you next time.”

That day, I froze. The resident typing at the computer was a senior from my school—one of the kind ones who looked after underclassmen. I hadn’t imagined running into a KU senior there, least of all in that room. We locked eyes, both stunned. Then she silently turned to the monitor and studied the notes. Maybe it was my imagination, but something about her face had hardened.

I didn’t go straight home. I waited in the hall until clinic hours ended, then slipped back in. The professor had already left. The nurses were gathering their things. It was just the two of us.

“That must’ve been a surprise,” I said.

“I didn’t know you were a patient here,” she answered.

“I have a favor,” I said simply. “Please don’t tell anyone at school.”

She promised she wouldn’t. I chose to believe her—because she was decent, yes, but mostly because that belief was the only way to keep breathing. The idea of my history becoming common knowledge at school was unbearable. All I could do was hope.

I worked hard to be the same as everyone else because I knew I wasn’t. And I tried just as hard to hide what was different. In hindsight, the problem wasn’t what other people might think. It was that I didn’t have the courage to show myself. More to the point, I hadn’t fully accepted myself.

Near graduation I got a chance to set that right.

Halfway through third year, we trade classrooms for wards and begin clinical rotations. There’s even a small White Coat Ceremony. For a year—from the middle of third year to the end of fourth year’s summer—we rotate through the majors like internal medicine and surgery (about a month each), and the subspecialties (one to two weeks each). After that, it’s a straight run at the national licensing exam.

Before that full-time exam sprint, we had a one-month external rotation. Students could leave the university hospital to broaden their experience. Some joined overseas medical missions. Others tried government agencies where patient care isn’t the main job. A few used a relative’s clinic as paperwork while they backpacked.

Me? Like a salmon running upriver, I went back to the beginning: the pediatric cardiothoracic surgery service at the very hospital where I’d been operated on. I started by visiting my longtime pediatric cardiologist, Professor Yoon, who’d followed me since infancy. I told him I wanted to spend the month there. He said of course. He called the surgeons and made it happen.

I still remember fragments of my surgery day. Waking at six. My mother holding my hand all the way to the operating wing. The ceiling lights sliding past as the gurney rolled. The jumble of beeps and soft shoes and clipped voices inside the OR. A mask lowered over my face. Then, suddenly, brightness, a different ceiling, monitors chirping somewhere to my left, shapes moving in and out of a fog—the ICU, after.

A decade later I came back, no longer in a striped patient gown but in blue scrubs. Not on the table, but beside it. The window that had been sealed to me—the hours between anesthesia and recovery—suddenly opened.

From early morning, tiny patients climbed onto the operating table. Kids who would scream at a vaccine shot were, in this room, astonishingly calm. They slid from gurney to table when asked and lay down when told. Then they slept. Their chests were opened. Their hearts appeared, small and fierce.

I watched and thought: What kind of life will each of them have? Like me, they’ll cry buckets in private. Like me, they’ll have to fight for what most people take for granted. A “normal” life—so humble to some—would be their Everest.

When the day’s cases ended, I went back to the empty OR alone. The floor gleamed. The machines were silent. The room looked nothing like the buzzing, bright place it had been hours before. In the center sat the table. I laid my hand where my body had been laid all those years ago.

I closed my eyes and saw the night before my surgery. I had looked across the hospital yard at the medical library and made myself a promise: to live not a life looking out from a hospital bed toward that library, but the reverse—to stand in the library, looking toward the wards, living a life that faced patients. Back then, lying on this table, did I really believe that would come true? And now—do I truly believe in myself?

That’s when it clicked. My past and present weren’t separate compartments. I didn’t need to hide one to earn the other. I decided not to hide anymore. I decided to care less about what others might think and more about what I choose to think of myself—past, present, and future.

I spent far too long living by other people’s eyes. I wish I’d been bolder sooner. Then again, maybe that season of hiding taught me to listen harder to my own voice later. People say no experience is wasted. I believe it. Even the years I strained to blend in were part of the making. I wandered the long way around, and that’s how I arrived here—unfinished, still walking.