Chapter 718: The Foreign Monk Knows How to Recite Chants
Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation
The doctors of Donghuang Regional Hospital watched every step as they communicated in soft voices.
To them, the foreign surgery team did things very differently from what they were used to.
First of all, their way of operating on patients and the way they worked with each other were different.
Even though hepatectomy was a major surgery, Lloyd only brought two assistants to the surgery. The associate chief physician from Donghuang Regional Hospital, Zhao Dong was one of them. As for the other assistant who was from Anderson Cancer Center, he merely stood beside Lloyd and Zhao Dong like a wallpaper. Lloyd did not even need his help.
Even when they reached the middle of the surgery and it became obvious that they needed more help, the assistant who did nothing continued to do nothing.
The doctors from Donghuang Regional Hospital could not help but discuss among themselves in low voices.
Doctors nowadays had plenty of opportunities to communicate and exchange views with doctors from other hospitals. This was especially true when it came to communication with doctors within the country. It was very normal for departments to hire surgeons or send their own doctors out for freelance surgery.
With the standard of Donghuang Regional Hospital, they still had to hire plenty of freelance surgeons from Beijing itself every year. Sometimes, it was to the point that they had no choice but to do so. There were also times when freelance surgeons brought their own patients over to operate on in Donghuang Regional Hospital so that the doctors in Donghuang Regional Hospital could learn from them.
In conclusion, the doctors in the operating theater had worked as a doctor for more than ten or twenty years, and they had seen a lot of the world. However, they were still not quite used to the way foreign doctors were economical when it came to manpower.
Of course, “economical” was a nicer way to put things. It would not be wrong to describe them as “being so poor that they could not afford extra manpower”. In the United States, every single attending physician had to be paid a few hundred USD or even up to a thousand USD for each freelance surgery. Hence, ordinary patients and insurance companies never appealed for more doctors to operate on a single patient.
On the other hand, foreign hospitals did indeed have FEWER doctors at their disposal.
Even an excellent doctor like Lloyd did not have long-term subordinates working under him. The team he brought to Donghuang Regional Hospital this time merely comprised of medical staff members who had worked together over a long period of time. Since they were paid in USDs, those who participated in the surgery worked earnestly. As for the assistant who was merely watching from the sidelines, he watched the surgery so earnestly that he did not even go near the operating table, all in the name of reducing pollution.
The doctor who was watching the surgery would only step forward whenever Zhao Dong, who was the first assistant, did not know how to use certain instruments. He would then provide simple guidance to Zhao Dong.
Zhao Dong naturally knew how to use all the common instruments. As for those he was not used to, many of them were instruments that had basically never made an appearance in China. For example, a complicated retractor exclusive for hepatectomy.
It did not require an assistant to operate it manually. A doctor just had to adjust the screws on the retractor, and it would retract the patient’s skin by itself. To doctors in China, this instrument was practically meaningless.
Even so, Zhao Dong felt that he had learned a lot.
The way Lloyd operated was quite different from surgeons in China. For example, he used a type of scissors that was rarely used by doctors in China. If Lloyd were working under a fierce doctor from China right now, he might have gotten scolded for using the wrong instrument.
However, Lloyd was so good with his hands that no one in the operating theater could second-guess his skills at all. If they were in the battle field right now, Lloyd would be the type of fighter who could defeat most opponents during the first round itself.
Because of this, the way he did things and his habits did not need to be put into consideration. Instead, the doctors watching the surgery should wonder about how he came to be such an excellent surgeon.
Pharmaceutical sales companies were willing to fork out large sums of cash to hire doctors to perform demonstration surgeries as well as write research papers and summaries. Sometimes, the doctors did not need to do anything other than contribute their names. The companies were willing to do so because of the “celebrity effect” those doctors brought about.
Lloyd was most definitely a celebrity doctor, regardless of whether it was in China or any other country.
The fact that the livestream of the surgery was broadcasted in 112 places via Yunli Medical Company’s livestreaming platform was self-explanatory.
As Yunli Medical Company had only started using this high-definition video acquisition system at the beginning of the year, even though they were easily able to build the largest surgery livestreaming platform in the country, the total platforms they set up in other hospitals was still not very high.
But the fact that the surgery was broadcasted in 112 places was already a pleasant surprise to the IT department of Yunli Medical Company.
After all, their livestreaming platform ran on a business-to-business model. There might be a few or a couple of dozens specialists watching each broadcast. The figures might be even higher than this.
As this surgery was a hepatectomy, the fact that it was broadcasted at 112 places meant that a total of 112 clinical, research, or didactic units from General Surgery Departments and Departments of Hepatobiliary and Pancreatic Surgery from various hospitals were watching from the surgery. No matter how a person looked at it, it was considered very large-scaled.
“We should ask hospitals to do this more. We obviously get a lot more viewership when we broadcast surgeries carried out by foreign specialists compared to local specialists. It’s cooler too.”
“Local specialists reside in our country, after all. The doctors could meet those specialists easily. So if those doctors are busy with something else, they wouldn’t be in a haste to watch livestreams of surgeries by local specialists. Foreign specialists are hard to come by, so it’s normal for all the doctors to tune in regardless of whatever’s on their plate…”
“We should advertise this. The number of installations would definitely go up even more.”
The staff members in the IT department of Yunli Medical Company quickly started brainstorming. After a few of the leaders of the department gave their words, their subordinates immediately copied and pasted their replies.
[Noted. Will execute this immediately.]
[Noted. Will execute this immediately.]
[Noted. Will execute this immediately.]
…..
Lloyd was rather happy when he heard that quite a lot of people were watching his surgery.
However, his maneuvers were not affected by this happiness. He continued to operate on the patient at full focus, neither showing off his skills nor upping his pace.
Lloyd was not fast compared to local doctors. His techniques were not cutting-edge either. However, the quality of surgeries could not be determined by a few fixed factors.
From the moment the incision was made, every single surgery done by the doctors would be different.
It was just like how the same mathematics question could be solved via various methods. Each surgeon approached the same kind of surgery differently too.
From the very beginning, Lloyd chose to make a large incision. Compared to doctors who preferred making smaller incisions, he had made things easier for himself from the start.
Next, each doctor performed exposure, chose surgical fields, and sliced off cancerous cells differently too.
Lloyd always chose the easy way out.
This was why he did not need to possess earth-shattering skills. All he needed was excellent judgment.
“Simplicity does the job,” Xu Jinyi suddenly said emotionally and started a conversation.
“It doesn’t look like anything special, but when you think carefully about it, we might not even do the same when operating on patients.”
“He is from Anderson Cancer Center, after all. Truth be told, patients don’t care about how difficult your maneuvers are. All they care about is the results.”
“Local surgeons can’t do the same. Patients in China always judge how surgeries went by the size of the incisions. They’ll think that you have done a good job when the incisions are small, and when the incisions are big, they will feel that something had gone wrong during the surgery…”
Xu Jinyi cleared his throat a few times. “Let’s focus on the good. We invited him over so that we can learn from him, not so that we can criticize our own people.”
“Our department director is right. Please take note that during the discussion session after this surgery, each of you must state one strength of their team and talk about how we can learn from it.” The other associate chief physician in the department raised his voice, and the young doctors no longer dared to speak.
All of them obediently turned toward the operating table and continued watching the surgery. No one dared to utter a word.
Meanwhile, Lloyd was almost done with the surgery.
“Can we continue watching the surgery we were watching just now after I’m done?” Lloyd had completed all the main steps of hepatectomy, and he sprinkled a little bit of hemostatic powder on the site where the cancerous cells were sliced off, which showed mild signs of cirrhosis. He then carefully checked the drainage tube. He was already speaking in a tremendously relaxed manner.
Xu Jinyi smiled. “Doctor Lloyd, good joke.”
“I’m serious. I want to watch Doctor Ling’s surgery.” Lloyd’s tone became solemn. It was not easy to become one of the top doctors in the world, and it was even harder to keep that status. Of course, Lloyd was glad to make a large sum of USDs. However, he would still find ways to save time so that he could use the extra time he had to improve himself.
