The Detail of the Director of a Plastic Surgery Clinic in Jamsilsaenae, Shown Through Assembling the Keeppley Kuromi Music Box.

After spending all day under the operating room lights drawing delicate lines and stitching, there are times when I want to quiet my mind by immersing myself in something with no distractions.

On days like that, one of the still hobbies I choose is block assembly.

When my child was young, I made a great many blocks and plastic model kits out of love, but lately I have been so busy with work that it has not been easy to make time for them.

But recently, I got my hands on the 2024 officially licensed Sanrio Kuromi Starry Music Box (K20822) by Keeppley, and I thought it would not take as much effort as expected?

Using the manual dexterity I have built up over years of plastic surgery operations, I completed it quite easily.

Actually... I am not sure whether "easily" is the right expression. The assembly itself was easy, but the completion was definitely not easy.

That is because, while the design is very pretty, the assembly process itself was ordinary, but getting it fully completed was not easy at all.

A large part of that comes from the product’s limitations. The compatible blocks included with Keeppley seem to have slightly unsatisfying precision between parts, what is commonly called tolerances.

Especially in cases like this music box, which includes a rotating mechanism, it seems the design intentionally reduced the connection strength to make rotation smoother, but the clutch power between the blocks was insufficient, so they kept collapsing weakly, and blocks I thought were firmly connected kept coming off very easily.

I made this hoping my children would find it interesting and play with it, but when you turn the little music box, Kuromi falls to the floor.

Isn’t that, in a way, destroying a childlike sense of wonder?

By temperament, I am not the kind of person who can just fit things together roughly and move on. In the end, I brought in the medical forceps I use in the clinic and picked up each piece one by one. Feeling the interlocking sensation between the blocks sensitively through my fingertips, I applied a very small amount of glue to the areas where the bond felt unstable, steadily securing the center without wobbling.

As I focused all my attention on the tip of the forceps to level the blocks, I found myself briefly overlapping that image with myself standing in front of the operating table. Eye surgery, where the outcome changes depending on tiny differences in tissue position and tension, requires the same level of concentration and patience as this block assembly.

Seeing that I cannot overlook even a slight misalignment outside the operating room, it seems the profession of doctor has deeply permeated the way I live my life.

Although it took longer than expected because I had to fill in even the tiny gaps inside the blocks that others would never see, hearing the smoothly turning melody of the music box washed away my fatigue.

I really like that firm and thrilling sense of accomplishment that comes only when you do not neglect even the smallest detail.

Tonight, I will wrap up my day while listening to this neat music box sound. Tomorrow morning in the clinic, I will need to be ready to welcome the people who trust me and come to see me, with the same careful hands I used to build these blocks today.

Written by Director Im Jin-young of Piap Clinic.