Chapter 705: Like
Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation
“Blunt separation via the gap between the extensor carpi radialis and the extensor hallucis longus… tendon stripping from beneath the periosteum… nothing wrong here…” Zuo Cidian muttered each step. After he was done, he laughed happily as he looked at his handiwork.
The houseman looked at Zuo Cidian like he was looking at an idiot. ‘The surgery has just begun, and only 10% of the work is done. What is he so happy about? Has his brain gone haywire because of his old age? Well, it wouldn’t be a surprise that the brain of a forty-something-year-old resident doctor has gone haywire.’
Zuo Cidian turned to look at the houseman. “Are you finding it very strange that I’m laughing?”
The houseman panicked. “How did you know this?”
“The three housemen who were here before you felt the same.” Zuo Cidian flashed an all-knowing expression.
The houseman panicked even more. “Where had the three housemen before me gone?”
“They probably left because they couldn’t find a job in this hospital.” Zuo Cidian smiled.
The houseman flashed an alarmed expression. He only said slowly after a while, “Didn’t they say that there’s a high chance that a houseman will get hired by the hospital if he learns from Doctor Ling’s treatment group?”
“There’s such a legend? But even if it’s true, you should at least make Doctor Ling aware of who you are, don’t you think so?” Zuo Cidian flashed an extremely bright smile. “How is Doctor Ling going to help you when it comes to finding a job when he doesn’t even know your name?”
The houseman widened his eyes so much that he looked like a goldfish. “Don’t they say that you get to learn new techniques while in his team?”
Zuo Cidian lowered his head to look at his patient with Colles’ fracture. He then chuckled and asked, “Then, have you managed to do that?”
‘Have I? Have I? Have I?’
What Zuo Cidian just said echoed in the houseman’s mind, so much so that his entire body trembled.
Zuo Cidian chuckled again and carried on with his task.
He cleared the blood clot on the site of the fracture before he performed a reduction. He then said, “Time to use a C-arm. There’ll be some radiation.”
The houseman started setting up the C-arm X-ray machine in a dumbfounded manner. He was busy all the way through setting up the machine.
Zuo Cidian, too, busied himself. This was how things were like when they could not perform manual reduction on patients with Colles’ fracture. The workload was a lot higher. Besides, when internal fixation was performed, doctors had to pay extra attention so that there was no infection.
The only way orthopedists could one-up general surgeons who looked down on them was by talking about the prevention of infection.
Compared to the General Surgery Department, the Orthopedics Department was excellent when it came to the prevention of infection. All their operating theaters were high-end ones like laminar flow operating theaters. Zuo Cidian only got his application for the operating theater approved after notifying Ling Ran about it.
The Orthopedics Department of Yun Hua Hospital paid no attention to this matter. Yun Hua Hospital was extremely large, and when compared to other tertiary Grade A hospitals like the Second Yun Hua Hospital, Yun Hua Hospital had more patients, and the workload of the doctors there was higher. The doctors there were also more willing to… carry out freelance surgery.
The doctors at the Orthopedics Department had so many hip replacement surgeries lined up that they could not even finish them. Since the doctors in the Emergency Medical Center were willing to take over operating on patients with Colles’ fracture, which was a minor surgery, the doctors in the Orthopedics Department merely treated this as them finding someone who was willing to help them out with miscellaneous tasks. They neither welcomed them nor stopped them from doing so.
Of course, this was also because Yun Hua Emergency Medical Center was pretty highly-ranked. If the Orthopedics Department were more powerful than them, they might not have taken this lying down.
Zuo Cidian knew the politics that came into play in such matters better than Ling Ran. This was why he treasured the opportunity to operate on patients very much. He earnestly completed each step and savored the process.
Orthopedics surgeries were not difficult, to begin with. They were easy to learn and easy to master.
Zuo Cidian had put in considerable time and effort. Coupled with the fact that he was getting the right opportunities, the feeling of becoming great also grew increasingly prominent.
Throughout the whole surgery, Zuo Cidian only faced slight difficulties while trying to bend the surgical steel panel.
All the surgical steel panels provided by pharmaceutical sales companies were industrial products. However, the bones of every single human grew in a different manner. This was why orthopedists needed to bend the surgical steel panels to suit the arc of the patients’ bones.
Orthopedists were not called carpenters for no reason. Young orthopedists might be doing nothing but lifting patients’ thighs all day. Even experienced orthopedists could not escape the fate of bending surgical steel panels themselves. Well, it could be considered an arm workout.
The forty-three-year-old Zuo Cidian was still capable of this. After all, even fifty-year-old chief physicians had to bend surgical steel panels by themselves when the time came.
To make himself feel better, Zuo Cidian imagined that he was a handsome doctor who looked cool bending surgical steel panels.
*Shick.*
The door of the operating theater opened, and a handsome doctor walked in.
“Doctor Ling.” The houseman’s body tensed up. He immediately greeted Ling Ran.
The nurse, too, gazed at Ling Ran with sparkling eyes. She looked happy.
“I’ll take a look.” Ling Ran gave them a quick nod and asked Zuo Cidian, “Are things going smoothly?”
“It’s going quite well. The alignment is perfect.” Zuo Cidian was a little pleased with himself.
Perfect alignment meant that the site of the fracture had recovered to the point that it was as if the fracture had never happened. In other words, it meant that perfect recovery had been achieved. It was not something that could be successfully achieved every single time. Often, due to limitations related to the patient’s injury or the doctor’s skills, only functional recovery could be achieved.
Theoretically, the lives of patients who had only achieved functional recovery would not be affected. But of course, when it came to the effect, it would not be as flawless as those whose fracture had been perfectly aligned.
Whenever a doctor achieved perfect alignment while operating on a patient with Colles’ fracture, he would definitely score 75 marks or above for the surgery. If the marking scheme was not strict, he would get at least 80 marks.
Ling Ran nodded softly. He then put on a mouth face mask and observed Zuo Cidian and the houseman’s maneuvers from afar. After reading the patient’s X-ray scans, he nodded again and left the operating theater.
Zuo Cidian and the houseman breathed a sigh of relief in unison.
“It was so scary.” The houseman was trembling.
Zuo Cidian furrowed his eyebrows. “What were you scared of?”
“I was worried that Doctor Ling would find me an eyesore or something. That would make it difficult for me to get hired by the hospital, wouldn’t it?” The houseman looked a little bashful. For the past few years, there had been more and more medical students in the country. The housemen’s rotations had become shorter, and the number of housemen in hospitals just kept increasing. Everyone could feel that things were becoming more and more competitive.
Zuo Cidian, though, glanced at the houseman with a baffled expression. “Doctor Ling doesn’t even know your name. Would it matter even if he were to find you an eyesore?”
“He… He’ll know my name,” the houseman insisted.
“Are you sure?” Zuo Cidian laughed.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
The houseman only said in a soft voice after fixing his gaze on Zuo Cidian for quite a long while. “Even you get to learn from Doctor Ling. He will definitely want a younger and more energetic doctor…”
Zuo Cidian put down the piece of curved board that he was using to bend the surgical steel plate. He was worried that he would get too emotional and crack the houseman’s skull with it.
The houseman was also aware that he had said the wrong thing, and he quietly lowered his head.
When the scrub nurse who was standing beside them noticed the chilly atmosphere in the operating theater, she tried to liven things up. “Doctor Zuo, why don’t you tell a joke?”
The fact that a nurse took the initiative to ask him to tell a joke immediately made Zuo Cidian, who was still a resident doctor, very happy. He quickly said, “Let me think about it. Oh, yeah. You know, back in the days when I was young, everyone was poor. There was this old man who passed by a butcher’s stall when he was in the market. He gritted his teeth and decided to buy a little bit of meat. However, he had no idea how to cook it. As he was worried that he would waste the meat, he asked the butcher to write him a recipe. You know, what sauce to use and stuff. He planned to cook the meat according to the recipe…”
“Hahahaha.” The scrub nurse started laughing. “Doctor Zuo, you’re really old.”
The circulating nurse laughed so hard that there were tears in her eyes. “Handwritten recipes? The internet was already around in the nineties, wasn’t it? He could have just looked for a recipe online. Even if there wasn’t an internet connection in his house, he could have gone to his neighbors to do it.”
Zuo Cidian fell silent, even though he had not finished telling his joke. The corners of his lips twitched. ‘Now that I think about it, I do like it when Doctor Ling is in the operating theater.’
