THREE INTERNS, RIGHT OUT OF MEDICAL SCHOOL, STOOD IN a row in their powder-blue scrubs like some kind of honor guard at the outer edge of the operating room. It was as far back as they could get. The air was thick with vomit, body odor, and diarrhea. Fold-out surgical masks and clear plastic safety goggles weren't much protection, but they were better than nothing.

“What's the deal with this guy?” one intern said to the others.

“He took a piss out on the subway tracks this morning. He hit the third rail and electrocuted his penis.”

“You gotta be kidding me.”

Dr. Carolyn Yoon shot them a poison look over her surgical mask and told them to shush. She'd learned to deal with challenging circumstances like this by focusing on the science: observation and diagnosis, cleaning and suturing, the administration of medications, etcetera, none of which did her a damn bit of good when the 200-pound, howling, drunken psych job on the table reached up grabbed her by the neck.

“Whiddafuggahellyoudoon, bitch,” he said.

The interns gasped. The nurse attending, a big white guy with a military buzz cut and a goatee under his mask, yelped like a poodle and dropped a tray full of surgical tools that crashed hard and scattered across the floor like crabs running out of a bucket.

Dr. Yoon reached across her chest with her latexed left hand and gripped the filthy mitt that was clamped over her throat. Her little doctor fingers wound their way under the man's pinky and worked themselves around it. She peeled the pinky backward the wrong way against itself, wrenching the guy's tendons, breaking his grip on her neck, and exposing the soft flesh of his inner arm. Then she cocked her hip back like a baseball batter, formed an open-mouth cobra head with her right hand, brought it to her shoulder, and simultaneously flipped her hip and struck the man's elbow like a whipsaw with the cobra head.

While the guy twisted and howled, Dr. Yoon calmly walked across the OR, pulled a syringe out of a drawer, filled it, jammed it into his ass probably harder than she had to and shot him up with a boatload of morphine.

When the man finally collapsed, mumbling and breathing heavy, she stood there in front of the interns and cleared her throat.

Dr. Yoon's father was a diplomat from South Korea, and she spent eleven years growing up in China. While other kids were playing the oboe and working on the school newspaper, Carolyn Yoon was doing kung-fu training on a concrete floor with a sandbag and a bamboo stick.

But she didn't say that to her interns. Instead, she told them: “In retrospect, I could have simply restrained him and had one of you administer the morphine. But he pissed me off. Sorry about that, it was poor form. The lesson here is to always keep your cool, no matter what. Got it?”

They nodded. Yeah, they got it. But they all knew what the real lesson was: *You do not fuck with Dr. Yoon.*

By the time she walked out of the OR, it was time for rounds. Dr. Yoon exhaled and checked her phone. A few emails, a few texts, nothing important. The ER would be in full swing by now, and the rest of her shift would be an all-out sprint.

She'd left the interns with specific instructions about how to fix up the guy's hand and wrist, and she made a mental note to check back with them in an hour. In the meantime, she had to send someone in there to clean up the room—and the patient. She'd circle back later to deal with his deep-fried Johnson.

An orderly was pretending to dust some shelves around a nurses' station in the main ward. Tall guy, dreads. She called out to him, but he turned away quickly and pushed his little cart around the corner. Dr. Yoon shook her head.

That's the problem with this country, she thought. Nobody wants to do any work.