Oh no she confused him. She feels bad.

“I - no, if you're comfortable being exposed to a little bit of X-rays, I think I would rather you didn't break contact with her." The patient's temperature is finally trending upward and Marian is pretty sure that all their warming interventions were only managing to keep her from dropping further and it's the guiding that's making actual progress. "You'll be under a sheet and if you sort of move a bit to the side you won't interfere with the X-ray imagery. The tech just needs to line the machine up at the foot of the bed once I have the board in place for him." 

He nods. "Please just consider me a tool to achieve our goals." He can't bow and English just doesn't have the vocabulary and grammatical constructs for him to convey what he means. "I will do whatever is necessary to most efficiently and effectively help her recover."

...Marian thinks she gets the message and she really, really appreciates him. She still feels kind of bad but Hye-jin is, in fact, the top priority. 

She can talk him through where the X-ray board needs to go and what angle Hye-jin's torso needs to be supported at and then summon the X-ray tech - who's been having a very enjoyable break sitting outside on his phone checking his social media - to line up the machine correctly. After the chest X-ray she'll want to reposition the board under Hye-jin's abdominal region, with Tae-gun pressed against her side so he's out of the image but still in contact with a lot of skin area. 

And once the tech has departed and they have everything arranged back how it was in the bed, she will go refresh the computer until the imagery is uploaded to Hye-jin's chart! It'll be a longer wait for the radiologist to read the X-rays and put in their note, but Marian is capable of determining if tubes are in the right place (she still needs to wait for Dr Hulka's go-ahead but she does want to know in the meantime) and also can recognize, like, a massive hemothorax, though she would be surprised, Hye-jin's O2 sat is fine. 

The bullet looks like it exited cleanly, missing both of her lungs. There isn't a hint of a hemothorax building, but her sternum is cracked.

Alarmingly, there's some soft tissue damage around her heart.

....Marian spends a few moments reminding herself that she already knows everything she needs to about the patient's hemodynamics and the fact that the bullet probably grazed her heart on the way through her does not retroactively make her vital signs for the past hour worse. 

The fact that there's no sign of a bullet in her means there should be two holes. Marian isn't sure which hole the one in her chest is - proooobably exit wound given that it's the one the medics on the site noticed and put a dressing on? Hopefully the fact that she's been lying on her back put some pressure on the wound by itself, and she's not in a growing pool of blood, Tae-gun was under her and he got some blood smeared on him but it looked like drying blood from what was already all over her. 

Marian is going to page Dr Hulka - they probably want a bedside echo to see what kind of shape her heart is in and decide whether to expedite the OR trip - and then she'll explain to Tae-gun that she wants them to roll Hye-jin a little to the side so Marian can peek at her back and slap a pressure dressing on the exit wound that must be there. 

Sure, he can do that.

..........

Oh he should tell them about her regen.

"I have a thing I need to tell you that requires confidentiality."

"Oh. Um. Confidential as in I shouldn't put in in writing in her chart? Do I have your permission to tell other staff involved directly in her care if it's relevant?" 

"Confidential as in you should treat it as if you were under an NDA. Though I can't demand one right now, obviously. But that's the level of secrecy."

"...Okay. Got it." 

This comes up. Sometimes it's really critically important for a particular fact about an esper's powerset or backlash to absolutely not end up leaking to the public. There's a precedent for secrets on the level that only one nurse should know them; there's even a box in the chart for "there is an undisclosed fact about this esper" which tells the rest of the care team not to worry too much - or think too hard about it - if something doesn't make sense. Marian has never specifically been the one (1) nurse who knew a top-secret-NDA-level confidential fact about a high-level famous esper, but - this is fine. 

"She has regeneration powers," he says, quietly. "They're strong enough to survive swimming in lava for a while, and they probably mean her wounds aren't that bad." It goes without saying that her using regeneration powers causes backlash and so her healing herself is actively making her core temp get lower.

"Ohhhhh. That - makes sense of some things." Both the implausibly lucky 'escape' on her thigh wound and the temperature continuing to drop even once she was unconscious and not using her publically-known esper power. "I'll - tell Dr Hulka we should set up the blood transfusion as a top priority, not the OR. Um, do you - have past experience of how long her regen takes for - wounds this serious - I'm wondering if I should expect her to wake up anytime soon, her temp isn't low enough at this point to explain why she's unconscious." 

"No, I don't have specific experience, but I'd guess it's the blood loss and the exhaustion and the non-acute parts of her backlash."

“I can see that, yeah.”

They did send a hemoglobin after the two units of blood; Marian should go check if that’s back yet and how anemic she still is. ...And also check the non-disclosed medical information box, so the radiologist knows not to ask too many questions if the chest X-ray comes back looking like someone who was shot in the heart but has had a few days or weeks of healing up from it (at normal human rates of healing.) 

She's still anemic, but it's not nearly as bad as it would be for someone that did not have regeneration. From the hemoglobin, it looks like the bleeding has probably stopped entirely by now. Marian's patient has stopped leaking.

Plink, something falls from Hye-jin's hair and onto the floor.

...?

Tae-gun is kind of trapped under her and can't look but, what?

Um?????

…Marian bends to scoop it up from the floor under the bed.

UM???!!!!

“- Well. I guess I’m no longer confused why she’s still unconscious.” A moment later she realizes that Tae-gun can’t see what she’s holding at this angle. “Bullet fell out of her head,” she explains, and - will go palpate Hye-jin’s head to find the wound (exit wound but, like, not in the usual sense) and make sure it’s regenerating well.

(Marian hasn't actually ever had a patient with regen before. It happens ever that they need an ICU but not very often, only if their backlash is such that at some point they can't keep regenerating without worsening their overall condition. Which does seem to be the situation Hye-jin was in before they put some blood in her.) 

His heart nearly stops.

Head. Bullet. Someone shot Kim Hye-jin in the head?????????????????

Lee Tae-gun's composure has successfully been broken.

"She's stable," Marian says reassuringly. "Just need to stay on top of the backlash now." She's actually very calm about this. Hye-jin must have healed herself enough to regain consciousness long enough to get herself out of the dungeon, which is a good sign that mostly rules out non-regenerable brain damage, she was breathing fine on her own even once she lost consciousness again, and Marian has all her vital signs right up on that big screen and hasn't seen any of the fluctuations you would expect with rising intracranial pressure.

She still feels like an idiot for failing to notice but, in fairness to herself, the patient secretly has regen and so by the time she made it to the hospital at all there was not, in fact, still a life-threatening problem related to that particular injury for them to notice. Also her hair is really red to begin with, which makes it harder to pick up on bleeding there. 

The entry (and.... now technically exit...) wound is sneakily hidden in the back right temporal lobe of the cerebrum; just above and behind her ear, hidden by her extremely red hair. There's less blood than might be expected for a head wound, so probably this... came... after the other shots... when she had less blood to lose, despite head wounds tending to be notoriously bloody. And her too-bright esper red hair sure did soak up the blood well, didn't it.

It seems to be healing well, though? Probably?? There's, uh, some skull fragments and small amount of grey matter that are getting ejected after the bullet, apparently her regeneration is just throwing everything that is foreign or too broken for salvaging out entirely. The area would probably benefit from being cleaned, there's a lot of matted and bloody hair in the way.

She may be stable but whoever did this won't remain stable for long—

Focus. She survived being eaten by a dragon and bathed in lava, she survived being shot—

Except she was shot in the head which probably made her go unconscious in a dungeon that had been cleared. Which means that if she'd taken just a little bit longer to recover she'd have been trapped after the dungeon got sealed and regeneration can't heal that—

He had kind of hoped she'd have incinerated whoever did this. Even if on reflex. But no, they're probably still alive, and Tae-gun suddenly needs them to not be. Needs it very, very much. 

...it wasn't Kang Jaeha who did this, but it was almost certainly him who ordered the hit. The, the thing wearing his skin, it had his Hye-jin shot in the head.

Tae-gun pulls himself together. He pulls himself together because he cannot have feelings about Hye-jin and Jaeha at the same time, not in public like this. He'll have feelings later. For now, he'll—deal. Public face on.

...Marian does not miss that Tae-gun is very very upset about this. 

It - seems best to not make a big deal of it? Or acknowledge it much at all? (Marian certainly finds it antihelpful when she's fighting off an emotional breakdown at work if someone, like, indicates that they noticed, even if they're trying to help.) She'll...keep doing her job as though she's completely oblivious to the fact that he could possibly experience emotions. 

Nursing school does cover regen, which - like basically all esper powers - is wildly variable between people, but there are some recurring patterns. This looks like...shit nursing school was a while ago and Marian was very very nerdsniped at the time but hasn't prioritized reviewing terms for this in particular...

This looks like interior-to-exterior healing, she thinks - good for displacing foreign bodies like, uh, bullets, rather than risking trapping them in the esper's body - and...probably focused on critical functions rather than even all-over healing - from the outside, her chest wound looked like a fresh injury, just not as bad as it really was. Marian would consider Regen Internopugnica but Hye-jin is unconscious, and she's read papers on how true combat-focused regen espers can, for example, fight their way out of a dungeon while missing a limb and all their skin and suffering from severe airway scalding. Probably Internotegumenta Critica, it looks like the regen isn't going to leave her with disfiguring scars but it was clearly focused on critical function first. 

...Awwww and she can't even nerd out with Alison about whether she's classifying right and then put their analysis and classification in the chart. Because it's a non-disclosed medical fact. Rude

At least she can talk to one person about it. "Regen Internotegumenta Critica," she says, sounding very slightly smug and pleased with herself about it. "Everything looks good, the regen is pushing out some damaged tissue so I expect she'll be out a while longer while it regrows that part of her brain."

Her type clearly isn't smart enough to put displaced brain matter back even if that would go faster, you only see that occasionally with Uniformisystemica (regenerating everywhere at once evenly rather than from the inside out, and focused on the overall systemic functioning of the esper's organs) in the Velox (fast) or Fortis (exceptionally robust and resilient) subtypes. 

She should clean up Hye-jin's head a bit; the policy is that if you have time, it's recommended to, you know, tidy up loose ends so the other medical professionals don't have to try as hard to avoid thinking about what the non-disclosed medical fact might be. Also brain matter: ewwwwwww. Marian thought she had exactly two major squicks (saliva and stuff that comes out of lungs) but apparently literal grey matter leaking out of a hole in her patient's head is also up there. 

She...will put the bullet in her pocket? So it's not laying around the room where Dr Hulka might see it and speculate.