Lu Wenbin quietly washed his hands. He rubbed his palms together, rubbed his palms against the back of his hands, and rubbed his fingers against each other…
The quietness in the bathroom reminded one of a playground at night. When someone occasionally passed by, it could give someone a scare.
Lu Wenbin desperately tried to recall Ling Ran’s operating process in his mind.
Although he had seen Ling Ran’s M-Tang technique surgeries far too many times, when he learned that he was about to perform one on his own, he started to endlessly doubt himself once the feeling of excitement wore off.
“Doctor Lu, I’ll be your assistant today.” Ma Yanlin knocked on the door to the bathroom and began to wash his hands under the tap as well.
Lu Wenbin stood up straight in a decisive manner. He took a steamed towel from the pot by the door, wiped his elbows and arms, and said, “I’ll have to trouble you this time. I hope it doesn’t affect your normal work routine.”
“Normal work routine? You can’t find that in the Orthopedics Department. Compared with the Orthopedics Department, I’d rather work in the Hand Surgery Department.” Ma Yanlin snorted. Housemen had always been the representatives of the “even more miserable than you” group. The director of the Orthopedics Department did not like Ling Ran as well, and no one knew whether that had indirectly affected Ma Yanlin.
“Have you selected the date for your marriage?” Lu Wenbin tried to strike up a conversation.
“The preparations are almost done. Now, I’m mainly depending on the hotel’s availability to set the date. Even if you chose the day, if the hotel isn’t available, you can’t do anything about it.” Ma Yanlin’s ashen face beamed with a blissful smile.
Lu Wenbin stared at him before he said, “Don’t push yourself too much. Planning a wedding is a laborious task. You better not let yourself die of exhaustion in one go.”
“I’m not tired. My wife is handling all the wedding plans,” Ma Yanlin said as he let out a big yawn.
Lu Wenbin chuckled. He wanted to say something more, but when he turned around and saw the operating theater door, he was no longer in the mood.
It would be a waste to advise people to have less s*x with his remaining IQ.
“I’m going to the operating theater first.” Lu Wenbin put his arms up and stepped forward into the operating theater.
The scene of the first time he stepped into the operating theater a few years ago appeared involuntarily in Lu Wenbin’s mind. Back then, his clinical mentor was an attending physician from the General Surgery Department. The task assigned to him was aspiration. In the end, he nearly had the liquid end up washing the chief surgeon’s hands. It was also one of the worst scoldings he had gotten. At that time, Lu Wenbin began to question his life, the knowledge he gained in his medical studies, and himself.
However, thinking back now, he only felt that he was extremely lucky.
Lu Wenbin could not even stop thinking about how he was supposed to scold the interns today if they did the same thing.
It would definitely not be enough if he just scolded them for fifteen minutes. He may need to scold them throughout the entire operation.
Now that he thought about it, his clinical mentor had only scolded him for half the duration of the surgery. He must have had quite the self-control.
As Lu Wenbin thought of that, he could not help but smile.
The moment he entered the operating theater, Lu Wenbin’s face revealed a warm and nostalgic smile.
“Old Lu, not bad. You sure are confident!” Su Jiafu sat on his beloved stool and analyzed Lu Wenbin’s expression with his meticulous reasoning, which scored him more than six hundred points during his college entrance examination. ‘He’s got a confident smile. Without the boss around, he’s still so confident. I suppose he feels assured since he has so much experience in this.’ When he remembered that Lu Wenbin had been the assistant for nearly three hundred cases of M-Tang technique surgeries, Su Jiafu commended him instead.
Generally, an assistant who had assisted roughly a dozen surgeries would start to be able to practice that surgery. When assistants worked on a type of surgical case a hundred times over, they could more or less fight for the position of chief surgeon.
Of course, being a chief surgeon at this time did not mean that he or she no longer needed to be an assistant. But it was still better than always being an assistant.
However, if one were to calculate the time, the period Lu Wenbin took to complete three hundred M-Tang technique surgeries as an assistant was very short.
A very obvious comparison was the Hand Surgery Department’s Attending Physician Tie Bei. He had followed Department Associate Director Pan to learn the M-Tang technique for more than two years, and it had now been nearly three years, yet he still never got the chance to perform a surgery independently.
The reason for this was his low accumulation of surgical experience.
In Yun Hua Hospital, or any other hospital, it was rare for any doctor to be able to accumulate surgeries at Ling Ran’s speed.
“How’s the patient?” Lu Wenbin did not respond to Su Jiafu’s teasing. If he continued the conversation, the two of them would keep chatting throughout the whole operation.
When he was an assistant, Lu Wenbin liked to chatter in that manner.
However, as a chief surgeon performing his very first M-Tang technique surgery independently, Lu Wenbin was in no mood to chat at all.
He was so nervous that he could eat four pork trotters with a bowl of dough drops and assorted vegetables soup!
“The patient set off firecrackers and injured his hand during the blast. The Emergency Department’s initial diagnosis was a flexor tendon injury in Zone II…” The patient had been sent in by an ordinary-looking resident doctor.
Lu Wenbin’s gaze was fully focused on the patient. He shook his head and asked, “What do you mean he set off firecrackers and injured his hand?”
As he spoke, he went to see the patient’s palm and found that it was indeed a mess.
“Fireworks, I think. It’s either that or firing salvo, I can’t really remember.” The resident doctor stopped talking for a moment before he explained, “It seemed that he was setting off firecrackers during a wedding and was not paying attention. He was then wounded by the blast.”
“He’s heavily injured. The blast must have been quite huge.” Lu Wenbin frowned.
“He fell after being injured. We performed X-ray scans on him and found that the bones on his fingers seemed to be slightly dislocated as well.”
“He has secondary damage too?” Lu Wenbin instantly felt a little dizzy. The complexity of the injury was somewhat beyond the normal scope. If Doctor Ling came to handle this… he might still be able to handle the situation with ease.
Lu Wenbin could not help but sigh in his heart.
It was easy for a person’s self-confidence to plummet when that person had been doing surgeries with an extremely capable doctor.
This was especially so when performing surgeries with an extremely competent and gifted doctor. It would be exceptionally difficult to build up that person’s self-confidence.
Lu Wenbin desperately recalled Ling Ran’s strategies during his surgeries, and he was immediately lost in his thoughts.
“Doctor Lu?
“Old Lu!”
Ma Yanlin shouted several times before he saw Lu Wenbin turn his head around. He immediately knew that Lu Wenbin was dumbfounded.
Ma Yanlin suddenly had an idea and said, “I have to say, I’d like to have fireworks during my wedding too.”
“Are you complaining that your hands are too complete?” Su Jiafu chuckled.
“It looks nice, and it would be loud. Aren’t weddings nowadays for celebratory purposes?” Ma Yanlin answered naturally.
Su Jiafu looked at Ma Yanlin discriminatingly. “Who said that weddings are just for the sake of celebration? Weddings are to exchange vows and claim that another person is now your lawful spouse. It’s the bride’s playground, understand?”
Ma Yanlin made an impromptu quip, “Exchanging vows and proclaiming each other as lawful spouses with fireworks? Not a bad suggestion…”
“Let’s begin with debridement.” Lu Wenbin finally snapped out of his daze. His mind had begun to work.
“Noted. Please prepare the debridement pack.” Ma Yanlin was also very skilled as an assistant, and he actually looked even more skilled as an assistant than Lu Wenbin.
Nonetheless, once the debridement was completed and the operation reached the stage where they were to suture the flexor tendon, Lu Wenbin’s mind finally became flexible and alive.
Although he rarely stood in the position of a chief surgeon, he always daydreamed about the feeling of being a chief surgeon.
However, the moment he actually stood by the operating table as a chief surgeon, Lu Wenbin discovered that the position was truly… horrifying.
He had to make all the decisions.
He had to carry all the responsibilities.
Most of the decisions made were followed by his own surgical procedures, and they were extremely delicate.
Every decision needed to be made quickly. He did not have time to think deeply, and the patient’s body would not wait obediently for him to slowly make his decisions either.
It was like compressing a one-hundred-and-twenty-minute exam into twenty minutes, and it was the kind of exam that you could not get a question with major marks wrong, or else you would fail the entire exam.
Lu Wenbin had to constantly hypnotize himself in order to persevere.
“This is a pig’s hoof, this is a pig’s hoof… This is just a pig’s hoof…”
Ma Yanlin could not clearly hear what Lu Wenbin was saying. He was just sure that the operation was going smoothly, and he felt very comfortable.
Ma Yanlin completely ignored Lu Wenbin’s murmurs.
Surgeons had too many quirks. It was not surprising that some doctors would show some characteristics they normally would not show when they became a chief surgeon.
…..
Ling Ran dressed neatly and began the process of clearing the surgeries in the Third People’s Hospital of Yun Hua City.
He was a strict and careful person, and he made a lot of demands in his surgical procedures. However, once the surgery began, Ling Ran’s zealousness, strictness, patience, and Perfect Level Knee Arthroscopic Meniscoplasty played a significant role in the surgery’s effectiveness.
His schedule of carrying out an operation at thirty minute intervals in Yun Hua Emergency Medical Center was often limited by the number of patients and beds, making it impossible for Ling Ran to fully enjoy himself.
Despite that, there were some old patients who had been waiting for their surgeries for two or three years in the Third People’s Hospital of Yun Hua City.
Not all meniscus injuries required an operation. Although, from the current medical point of view, it was difficult to avoid receiving surgeries for meniscus injury. But the operation time could indeed be delayed via traditional treatment, and many patients had their surgeries delayed for many years.
However, compared with ordinary people, it was difficult for those who underwent traditional treatment for AIDS. With their autoimmune deficiency, their injuries would worsen by a large margin.
There were so many patients who longed to receive surgery, so much so that even if Ling Ran did perform surgeries back-to-back, he still could not finish them all in a day.
Ling Ran did not mind. He was, instead, a little excited.
*Ding*
[New Achievement Unlocked: A Doctor’s Growth]
[Achievement Description: Mentored a doctor who can complete a new surgical procedure independently.]
[Reward: Intermediate Treasure Chest]
