Black Pean information #32 (final)

[tronella]

Afterword

I think I was first approached about being the medical consultant for Black Pean towards the end of last year. Staff members came to the hospital, explained the contents of their plan, held meetings to prepare for observing surgeries, then before I realised it they were contacting me almost every day and we had meetings about three times a week, then rehearsals, then filming started and I went to the set about twice a week, I think.

I talked about how I became a doctor 12 years ago, learned how to operate on my own, gained confidence little by little and, at the same time, rediscovered how frightening surgery can really be. Every day at the hospital I thought about what I should do in order to provide the best possible surgery and worked hard.

I had never done any TV-related work before, let alone worked as a medical consultant. Before I had time to wonder if I could do it, a staff member in charge of medical matters said “You’re almost the same age as Dr Tokai, and you’re good at surgery, so we’d really like you to do this,” skilfully getting me excited about the idea, so I started off feeling good, but honestly, this job was tougher than I imagined.

First of all, when I learned that making a single drama involved so much hard work, and that more people than I expected were putting their hearts and souls into it, I knew it was impossible to do this half-heartedly. Developing the parts related to medical care, thinking about how the diseases and surgeries should progress, gathering materials, checking the scripts, having meetings, going to rehearsals, going to the set, setting up the operating room, checking the editing... once I even went to the studio after staying up all night for an emergency operation. I even bowed my head to the hospital director to get permission to go to the filming of a surgery scene.

That was the sense of responsibility I felt.

When they talked to me about it for the first time, I was embarrassed that I hadn’t read the original book, so I got a copy of “Black Pean 1988” and read it. Tokai was a gastrointestinal surgeon, and his father was a doctor of internal medicine who was falsely accused of a crime, driven out of the hospital and then died. In this drama, we changed the setting from gastrointestinal surgery to heart surgery and changed Tokai’s father from a doctor of internal medicine to a heart surgeon. Tokai learned his genius-level surgical skills through tenacity and abnormal effort in order to clear his father’s regrets.

My father was a heart surgeon too.

When I was 5 years old, my father came home early for the first time in a while and told my mother how he’d accidentally pricked his finger with a needle during surgery. That was a medical error. The patient for that surgery had hepatitis B virus. A few weeks later, my father died from acute hepatitis. It really happened in the blink of an eye. My strong, surgeon father, who worked from morning to night without resting for the sake of his patients, suddenly died at the age of 31. At age 5, that’s when I realised how fleeting human life is.

After that, partly to clear the regrets of my late father, I became a heart surgeon, and after turning 31 I was able to perform surgery. I lived longer than my father was able to, and while doing the things my father couldn’t do, saving the the lives he might have saved and working hard every day, I heard about this “Black Pean”.

So far in my life, there have been a few moments when I thought “sometimes, it feels like someone is controlling my life”. Through mysterious meetings and fate, my life has gone this way up to now. Thanks to the various doctors I’ve met and the things I’ve been taught by my seniors, I learned to do surgery. The Japanese Society for Cardiovascular Surgery now has over 4000 members, any one of whom could have been asked to consult on this drama. However, by some twist of fate, they asked me. I can’t see it as a coincidence.

If this had been a simple medical drama where a surgery seemed like it was about to fail but was saved by a genius surgeon with overwhelming skills, would I have been able to devote myself so thoroughly to this consultant job? Behind the structure of surgical skill versus new medical treatments, we have this complex human drama involving Tokai, whose background is so similar to mine, his thoughts about his father and his antagonism with Professor Saeki, as well as asking what a doctor is and what life is. In this drama, people once again desperately grapple with these “issues” that have been used as themes countless times before, right from the start... If I hadn’t identified with all these characters so strongly and been left with such a deep impression, I wouldn’t have been able to get so caught up in this work.

In “Black Pean”, there isn’t a single patient who dies. The only death is that of Dr Tokai Ichiro. The source of Tokai Seishiro’s skill as a genius surgeon was his father’s death and his desire for revenge on Saeki Seigo, and what Professor Saeki wanted to convey more than anything was the wish he inherited from the late Dr Tokai Ichiro. The only person who died in this drama had the greatest influence and created the whole scenario.

The desire to clear away the regrets of a dead person can have a shocking influence on a person’s growth and can change their life in a big way. If my father hadn’t been a heart surgeon and hadn’t died, I don’t know what I would be doing now. Maybe I would have a completely different job. Dead people have a greater influence on others’ lives than people who are alive.

It is often said that “the souls of dead people live on in the hearts of the living”. Even now, when we can study the body on a molecular level at a university hospital, use scientific methods to the fullest, use heart-lung machines and stop the heart to perform surgery, I have no doubt about the truth of this very unscientific matter.

When I watched the scene in which Tokai Seishiro and Tokai Ichiro smoke together, I couldn’t help crying. My father smoked Seven Stars too.

I felt the enormous passion of this drama’s staff, the actors and Dr Kaidou on set, and their enthusiasm for portraying the thoughts of these people who prioritise human life was even greater than ours. I was personally inspired and was able to give it my all. I did everything to the best of my abilities.

Having seen all these first-rate people working together, doing their best to make a single work, displaying extreme talent and the efforts it took to produce that, I will always treasure the fact that I was able to make my small contribution. I am so grateful to my deceased father for making this chance happen.

Some people who work as healthcare providers might find it uncomfortable to watch medical dramas because of the impossible or unrealistic things that happen. However, if we tried to make it realistic and showed an hour-long video of heart surgery, it wouldn’t communicate how we put our souls into every single stitch. It would just be grotesque and nothing would come from it. It’s famously said that the model for Michaelangelo’s David was a very thin young man who looked like skin and bones. The creator’s aim must have been to portray the idealised form of a man, representing his beautifully balanced muscles to move people. The people who dramatically and vividly portray our feelings as healthcare providers as we put our lives on the line are none other than those who put their own lives on the line to make entertainment. I go into the operating room and really perform surgery almost every day, but that doesn’t move me at all. However, the scene where everyone works together desperately trying to save Professor Saeki’s life really affected me. I see the backs of white-coated doctors every day to the extent that I’m almost sick of it, but I don’t think anything of it. However, when all the mysteries were solved and I saw Tokai say “Goodbye. Become a good doctor,” as he left the hospital, I couldn’t help crying.

Finally, it takes hours to make a scene that lasts just a few minutes. For a single surgery scene, we kept filming from morning until night. Behind each scene there are the different hopes of many people, more preparatory work than you can imagine, the use of delicate and difficult skills and feelings that can’t be compromised on, as well as a vast amount of video and sound recording. Rather than protecting the medical consistency of each second of footage by adding more medical jargon, it’s clearly better to include complex human drama, emotional developments and the momentary expressions and brief comments of the actors portraying subtle signs of their emotions,

I hope my articles helped to preserve that medical consistency even a little, no matter how difficult it was to express. They might have been long and sometimes hard to understand, but I explained things to the best of my ability (there were actually even more points I should have explained, but if I wrote about them all it would get unbelievable long... sorry about that). As a heart surgeon, I’m so grateful to the staff members who gave me this space.

For six months, I’ve been engaged with this wonderful production and been able to work with wonderful people. Thinking of it now, those difficult days seem like a dream, and knowing that I’ll probably never experience this again makes me very sad.

Starting tomorrow, I’ll go back to living as a “normal doctor”, and I’ll do my best to perform surgery as well as possible. If it gets tough or I become discouraged, I’ll watch Black Pean and remember these days when I worked and sweated together with all these people to motivate myself.

To everyone who read these pages, I’m sure my words weren’t enough, my expressions were clumsy and my writing was hard to understand, but I’d be happy if I was able to express anything about what a heart surgeon thinks about every day, how we feel while operating and my feelings and experiences on set.

I will never forget the spring of 2018. Thank you very much.

Heart surgeon Yamagishi Shunsuke

Comments

[drarashi93.livejournal.com]

Welp. I might actually cry right now. It feels like the end of an era. I did not expect that background from Yamagishi sensei. Thank you for the explanations and helping make this drama great. Thanks for your hard work Sensei.

Also Thank You tronella, for taking time out of your life to translate not only the drama, but also all of the extra information. Otsukaresamadeshita!

[madteaparty-aj.livejournal.com]

Omg thank you so much Yamagishi sensei, and also thank you tronella for providing us with the translation :D
Yamagishi sensei is very much like Tokai sensei in some ways, I almost thought it was Tokai sensei for REAL!
but yeah, the best doctor are the normal ones