Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation
“Young Zhou did quite well today.”
“Old Zuo finally got to show his capabilities.”
“You know, if I were to appear on television, I might actually look quite photogenic.”
The young doctors leaned against and supported each other as they walked slowly towards the office. When they approached the office, everyone began to walk faster in unison.
When Ling Ran realized what was happening, all of them had already entered the area with the on-call rooms and filled up the first-string on-call rooms and second-string on-call rooms.
On-call rooms were meant for doctors on night shift. Sometimes, doctors who want to take a nap during lunch break could also sleep there. Of course, in reality, doctors did not really get lunch breaks, and thus, during the day, the on-call rooms were empty most of the time.
Today was an exception.
After participating in this kind of resuscitation surgery, everyone was rather tense. The resuscitation process was also very tedious, and right now, all the doctors who were part of the resuscitation felt tired and were scrambling to fill up all the beds. The camaraderie they exhibited just now disappeared in an instant as they fought for the beds.
Doctor Zhou waved the pillow on his bed and said with a smile, “First come first serve. Go and nap in the office for a while. You still have to work in the afternoon.”
Ling Ran nodded quietly and grabbed his trapezius with his hand and massaged it to relax it. He then looked at his hand. The Skill Serum was still effective for another half hour or so. He still had a lot of time left before the effects wore off, and it would be meaningless to sleep through it.
“Young Lu.” Ling Ran waved.
Lu Wenbin obediently jogged over. He looked like an adult dhole reporting to a young lion.
“Can you go to the operating theater and see if there are any patients who need M-Tang technique surgery, finger replantations, or Achilles tendon repair surgery? If there are none in the Emergency Department, ask the Hand Surgery Department if they have any. I’ll go and get prepared. We’ll begin the surgery in ten minutes.” Even though Ling Ran’s command was very simple, it was a very baffling one.
Lu Wenbin stared at Ling Ran in resignation and said, “Boss, this request is pretty strange, even when it’s coming from you.”
It was indeed uncommon in the hospital for a doctor to ask for an impromptu surgery to be arranged within ten minutes. Patients were not like watermelons that you can slice up anytime you want to.
Ling Ran thought about it and realized that it was also quite difficult to fulfill his request. He then said, “Can you go and ask around first? I’ll also go see Department Director Huo. If it’s inconvenient for us to make such a request, I’ll ask Department Director Huo to do it on our behalf.”
In Yun Hua Hospital, Department Director Huo could be likened to Doraemon. He could make even very unconventional things come true. Of course, he sometimes achieved them through indirect means.
Lu Wenbin felt a bit more at ease when he heard this, and quickly went to look for patients.
All the surgeries performed in specialist departments were arranged beforehand. Some patients would even start communicating with the doctors a few days, or even a few dozen days beforehand so that they could build a rapport with the doctors and choose a capable one to perform their surgery.
However, in the Emergency Department, it was pointless to try obtaining a guarantee that you would be treated by a certain doctor.
It was almost the same for finger replantation surgeries. Even though in most hospitals, finger replantation surgeries were carried out by doctors from the Orthopedics Department or Hand Surgery Department, patients might not get a complete doctor’s statement either. It was also very common for there to be a change in doctor.
In contrast, patients who required Achilles tendon repair surgery had more room for choice. However, in hospitals, ordinary doctors were not very interested in freshly ruptured Achilles tendon repair surgery.
Lu Wenbin looked for a patient at lightning speed. He checked the schedule of all four operating theaters of the Emergency Department and looked for the list of patients of the Hand Surgery Department and Orthopedics Department, before he finally managed to find a suitable patient, and it happened to be one who required Achilles tendon repair surgery.
It was a young man who looked like a white-collar worker. He came to the hospital alone, and according to the original arrangement, he was supposed to be operated on two hours later.
It was very common for patients with a fresh Achilles tendon rupture to wait for a few hours, or even a few days. If he waited for only two hours, it could only mean that the doctors had prepared for the surgery ahead of time.
Lu Wenbin immediately informed Ling Ran. After Ling Ran notified Huo Congjun, the Orthopedics Department went to inform the patient.
This patient was actually transferred to the Orthopedics Department from the Emergency Department to begin with. Nowadays, Ling Ran was very picky when it came to surgeries. He refused to operate on patients with less than two severed fingers, and even for patients with two severed fingers, it depended on the time and location at which the fingers were severed. Those whose fingers were severed below the middle finger joint definitely did not have much chance to have their fingers successfully replanted.
Ling Ran was even more unwilling to operate on patients with fresh Achilles tendon ruptures. After all, the difficulty level was low, and the surgery did not take much time. However, it fit today’s situation perfectly.
The doctors of the Orthopedics Department did not mind as well. For them, freshly ruptured Achilles tendon repair surgery was neither challenging nor useful in terms of personal development. Most doctors did not aim to become sports medicine specialists. It was a very stressful job with very few chances of them becoming successful.
Most doctors only saw freshly ruptured Achilles tendon repair surgeries as tendon-suturing practice. Moreover, the Achilles tendon was the largest tendon in the human body, and it was extremely easy to suture it.
However, all the doctors from the Orthopedics Department had heard about how Ling Ran operated on Liu Weichen’s Achilles tendon. After Huo Congjun persuaded them, they not only passed the patient to Ling Ran, but also came to watch the surgery in real-time.
Ling Ran was also quite satisfied because the Achilles tendon repair surgery was arranged for him within the timespan he used to wash up and change into a new pair of underwear.
He was wearing a brand new pair of underwear which cost 45 RMB. After he put on a pair of disinfected scrubs, he went straight to the surgical floor and entered the operating theater of the Orthopedics Department.
The white-collar worker who tore his Achilles tendon chatted with a few doctors from the Orthopedics Department who had entered the operating theater in advance. When he saw Ling Ran and the other doctors who came in with him, he immediately swayed his head and asked, “Doctor Ling, did you really operate on Liu Weichen’s Achilles tendon?”
Ling Ran nodded and gave him an affirmative answer. At the same time, he looked at the white-collar worker’s MRI scans.
He possessed the Master Level MRI Analysis on Four Limbs some time ago, and under the influence of the Skill Serum, his ability to read MRI scans on four limbs immediately elevated to Perfect Level; he could practically see countless details when he looked at the MRI scans of the white-collar worker’s feet.
“Can you upload the scans on to the computer and let me have a look at the data?” Ling Ran said to the circulating nurse and went to stand in front of the computer.
As the saying went, “Preparation ensures that work goes well.” Even though there was less than thirty minutes left to the serum’s effect, for Ling Ran, reading scans was still a priority.
An MRI scan was great in providing information to the doctor, and most of the information was not provided in the MRI images that were printed. If you were to print out all the information, the scans would fill up the entire operating theater.
In reality, an MRI scan was performed to gather data. The scans were only used to facilitate the doctors in reading the data that was processed. Hence, excellent radiologists always referred to the data when reading the scans. This was also why some students who specialized in radiology still cried out in frustration when they did their PhD.
Of course, the reading of data was a very inhumane activity. For the signal sampling of MRI alone, one needed to be well-versed in the Dirac Comb, Dirac Delta, Discrete Fourier Transform, Lorentz-Gaussian Window Function, and all kinds of other window functions to be able to do it.
In short, medical students who got a headache every time they saw the name “Lorentz” should not become radiologist. As one went further into radiology, the name “Lorentz” would become scarier and scarier.
The white-collar worker squirmed as he lay on the operating table. When he saw all the doctors staring at him, he got goosebumps all over his body.
“Is there a need for there to be so many doctors?” The white-collar worker complained, a little unsettled.
“If it weren’t for the fact that so many doctors want to see Doctor Ling operate today, you would have no choice but to be placed under the mercy of my knife.” The doctor Ling Ran replaced was an attending physician of the Orthopedics Department with the surname Sun. Even though he was just an extremely ordinary attending physician, he still had some pride and competitiveness in him.
“It’s not like I’m going to participate in the Olympics.” The white-collar worker chuckled a few times. When he saw Ling Ran turn his head, he took the opportunity to ask, “About this… Doctor Ling, what’s the difference between my Achilles tendon and Liu Weichen’s Achilles tendon?”
Ling Ran glanced at the white-collar worker and said to the nurse, “Raise it up a little.”
The nurse lifted the corner of the fenestrated drape sheet on the white-collar worker’s body.
Ling Ran lowered his head to take a look and said, “Liu Weichen’s is longer.”
The white-collar worker blushed as he looked at the nurse in front of him. “I was… I was only joking.”
“I’m not joking.” Ling Ran looked at the white-collar worker and said, “Liu Weichen’s is twice the average length of an Achiless tendon, while yours is only approximately two-thirds the average length.”
“I…” The white-collar worker suddenly registered his words. “You’re talking about Achilles tendons?”
“Didn’t you ask me about Achilles tendons?” Ling Ran gave the white-collar worker a baffled look.
The white-collar worker was stunned. “I asked about that, but you didn’t sound like you were answering my question.”
“I feel like he’s in quite a confused state,” Ling Ran said to Lu Wenbin, “Can you assess his cognitive functions?”
“Alright.” Lu Wenbin followed the standard procedure and asked, “Do you remember your name?”
“Li Zhou,” the white-collar worker answered.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-nine.”
“Do you remember how you ruptured your Achilles tendon?”
“I was chased by loan sharks, and they cut it.” Li Zhou the white-collar worker sighed loudly. He said this with such melancholy that he sounded like a forty-nine-year-old.
Lu Wenbin froze for a moment and changed the topic a little. “Why did you borrow money from loan sharks?”
Li Zhou the white-collar worker flashed a wan smile. When he saw that the doctors around him were looking at him, his urge to pour out his troubles increased.
“I was about to get married, and my girlfriend demanded a bride price of 300,000 RMB. I told her that it was too much. My girlfriend said that she could pay for half of it, and that she just wanted to look good in front of other people.
“She said that it was because her cousin-sisters got more than 200,000 RMB when they got married, and as a university graduate, her bride price could not be lower than her cousin-sisters who only studied up to high school. When I said that I didn’t have that much money, she suggested that we take a loan together.
“After I paid the bride price, we didn’t have enough money for the wedding and other things. I had no choice but to continue to borrow small sums of money. In the end, I was unable to pay my debts, and the loan sharks came after me. They chased me, and I ran. In the end, I fell down the stairs and broke my Achilles tendon…”
Lu Wenbin’s expression went dark. Even Ling Ran’s attention was captured by this story. He asked, “So, your Achilles tendon was ruptured because of the fall, and not because it was cut?”
Li Zhou froze for a moment and said, “It was because of the fall…”
“So, you intentionally provided us with false information just now?” Ling Ran sighed.
“How was it intentional? No, this is not the main point. My wife ran away. She promised to pay half the debt. She took the money and went to buy handbags and lipsticks. My salary isn’t even enough for the monthly interest…”
“Can we perform general anesthesia?” Ling Ran asked the anesthetist doubtfully. “Should we ask doctors from the Neurology Department to come here and take a look?”
“There’s no need for that.” The anesthetist laughed. “But I find this pretty interesting. Why don’t we just perform regional anesthesia so that we can chat with the patient?”
“Perform general anesthesia.” Ling Ran added as an explanation, “The error rate of the information he gives is too high, and this can easily mislead us during the surgery.”
