Chapter 638: Conversation

Academician Du’s expression was indecipherable as he gazed at the operation downstairs even though he seemed unperturbed.

Academician Zhu Tongyi glanced worriedly at Academician Du more than once, but both of them said nothing.

Truth be told, even though watching a surgery was thrilling, it was not terrifying at all.

First and foremost, this was because all doctors and nurses in the operating theater looked calm with solemn gazes. They gave other people the impression that they were doing something important, so other people did not really feel like they were dissecting a living human being.

Aside from this, as patients in the operating theater did not look human, it made less of a visual impact. Those viewing the surgery from the visitation room would just see the patient being covered from head to toe with a few drapes, and there were various types of machinery around the patient. If a person did not think to give it careful thought, they would not see the patient as a human being.

Even the small, exposed surgical field looked extremely tiny under the shadowless lamp. Moreover, as doctors always try to control bleeding as much as they could, not only did the exposed tissues did not seem disgusting, but they actually looked nothing out of the ordinary.

Nothing in the entire hospital felt out of the ordinary, and this was what ordinary people could not understand.

“Old Du, should we finish watching the whole thing?” By the time Ling Ran was cutting off the patient’s hepatic blood supply, Zhu Tongyi did not feel like watching the surgery anymore.

This was the maneuver with the highest failure rate and the most boring part of the surgery. He did not want Academician Du to feel worried because of this.

Academician Du, though, merely smiled and said nonchalantly, “Don’t be worried about me. I have actually watched more than one surgery before.

“Oh?”

“Have you forgotten that I was part of a geological team for a good ten years?” Academician Du started recalling. “It was very normal for us to travel in the mountains in the name of scientific research, and people break their limbs because they were not careful all the time. I have even met someone who got appendicitis because he drank unboiled water. He managed to stay alive until we arrived at a tiny county. The county was so small that it might as well be a town, but we would not be able to send him to the city in time. Hence, he had no choice but to receive surgery in the county.”

After Academician Zhu said this, he chuckled and continued, “There weren’t enough doctors in the hospital, and I helped out in the operating theater.”

Academician Zhu broke out in a cold sweat after he heard this. “You were in the geological team forty years ago, right? At that time, the standard of county hospitals was really low. They might be even worse than the hospitals attached to factories and mines.”

“Well, we had no choice at that time. The county was only populated by a few thousand people, so we didn’t have high hopes on it.” Academician Du paused for a moment and continued, “The number of times the doctors of that hospital had operated on patients could be counted on the fingers of one hand. They spent half a day looking for the appendix…”

Zhu Tongyi trembled.

Looking for the appendix was indeed the hardest and most important part of appendicitis. If this were to be part of the tests in medical schools, 70% of the students who had just graduated would fail it.

For inexperienced doctors, they might be able to easily find the appendix when things were going well for them. However, whenever they had trouble finding it, they would take forever to do so. Even junior doctors in large hospitals might spend hour after hour on it, let alone junior doctors in county hospitals. Those junior doctors would seek the help of senior doctors when this happened. They would then get scolded, and they truly deserved the scolding. There were, in fact, many junior doctors who fit in this category.

In the beginning, there might not be much difference between the skill level of junior doctors in county hospitals and junior doctors in large hospitals. They might even have more experience in various aspects due to the environment they were in. However, the biggest difference between them was that junior doctors in large hospitals had senior doctors to help them out during surgeries. Hence, they were gutsier as they had more room for mistakes.

In large hospitals, a junior doctor who could not find a patient’s appendix could ask for help from a senior doctor. However, when this happened to junior doctors in county hospitals, he would have no choice but to search for the appendix himself hour after hour.

As Academician Du stared at the operating theater below them, he continued, “At that time, operating theaters aren’t as well-equipped as they are now. I still remember that the floor was littered with gauze, and when we ran out of gauze, we used bandages. At the end of it, the incision was the length of a person’s arm, and we turned the intestines upside down before we managed to remove his appendix.”

“Things are different nowadays.” Zhu Tongyi was speechless. He could not imagine how an ordinary person must feel to be turning his colleague’s intestines upside down together with other doctors.

Academician Du was lost in his memories. He then smiled. “I sure hope that things are different now. That dear friend of mine ended up dying in the operating theater.”

Zhu Tongyi gulped and sighed.

If he were to come up with an explanation, there were actually a lot of things that he could say. The skill level and experience of doctors from different hospitals were different. The patients’ condition and the standard of anesthetists were also different. Even the drugs and technology used nowadays were completely different compared to the past.

However, Zhu Tongyi, who had been a doctor for around forty or fifty years, could not bring himself to utter such a nonchalant answer. The field of medicine was far from perfect. The problem Academician Du faced that day might be solvable. However, nowadays, there were still many patients who died from non-fatal illnesses.

“Ling Ran is different.” Zhu Tongyi could not solve such a systemic problem, so he had no choice but to say to Academician Du, “Old Du, you’re an academician, so I won’t give you a 100% guarantee. But I can tell you that to have Ling Ran operate on you is your best shot at survival.”

“After the surgery, I’ll just lie in the hospital bed, feeling tortured for some time, before I die. I wouldn’t call this survival.” Old Du’s tone was nonchalant.

“I agree.”

“You can’t guarantee that this won’t happen, right?”

“When you were in the geological team, you can’t really guarantee that there’ll be ore underneath the soil and that the investors will be able to get their money back either, right?”

“Are they comparable?”

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“Are they?” Zhu Tongyi answered the question with another question.

Old Du sighed and said nothing as he continued to gaze at the surgery that was going on.

Zhu Tongyi did not pressure Old Du. Old Du was the one who was sick, and he would have to be the one who took the risk. So, he should naturally be the one who made the decision.

The atmosphere in the operating theater downstairs was pretty good, though.

Other people in the operating theater could easily see whether things were going well for a chief surgeon.

Another chief surgeon would probably be boasting or cracking dirty jokes right now. Of course, due to the fact that there was a crowd, they might have remained silent too.

Ling Ran had always been the silent type, but to doctors and nurses who knew him well, there were different meanings to his silence. This was especially true for Yu Yuan and Zhang Anmin, who did not even need to look at Ling Ran’s face. They could sort of tell what he was thinking from the way he moved his hands.

This was just like how women worshippers could tell how beautiful women were feeling from the frequency at which she replied to their WeChat messages. Yu Yuan and Zhang Anmin were extremely used to the way Ling Ran worked.

Ling Ran was indeed in a pretty good mood today.

Even though he did not spend as much time practicing using the Virtual Human today, he was even more well-prepared than before. This also meant that he had more time left for him to use his Virtual Human.

And now, he only needed to practice on the simulation for around fifteen minutes to be able to operate on an elderly patient suffering from primary liver cancer almost perfectly. This meant that he could use fifteen minutes to buy the patient more than ten years of time.

The ratio was 15 minutes to 5,256,000 minutes, and this made Ling Ran feel good.

“Alright, go ahead and perform abdominal closure.” Ling Ran took off his gloves, which meant that the important steps of the surgery had been performed.

This was when Academician Du, who had remained silent for a long time, pressed the intercom button and asked from the visitation room on the first floor, “Doctor Ling, is the surgery a success?”

“Yes,” Ling Ran answered.

“How much longer do you think that this patient will live?”

“Probably more than ten years?”

“Isn’t there a possibility that the cancer will recur?”

“With the patient’s age, we should be more worried about the cancer spreading somewhere else or him getting other illnesses. Recurrence of liver cancer shouldn’t be a concern.”

They spoke really quickly, and Associate Hospital Director Wang from Beijing University Sixth Hospital was only able to stop Academician Du after a while. He said with a smile, “Academician Du, this is not how you use the intercom button.”

Academician Du snorted a few times and moved away a little.

The doctors present looked at one another at a loss.

This was not something that usually happened in the visitation room. Normal people would not ask surgeons these kinds of questions. But of course, normal surgeons would not answer such questions either.

As the saying went, “It takes two to tango”.

However, the crowd’s attention was immediately diverted by a more important question.

“A ten-year survival rate? Wouldn’t it be impossible?”

“Even a five-year survival rate is not guaranteed. He shouldn’t have made this kind of promise.”

“If the patient is indeed suffering from primary liver cancer, data shows that…”

“He really acted on a whim.”

“Young people are truly confident.”

Academician Du ignored the junior doctors who were muttering among themselves. He turned to look at Zhu Tongyi, took a deep breath, and said, “Old Zhu, why don’t you introduce Ling Ran to me?”

“Certainly.” Zhu Tongyi immediately agreed.

The doctors in the visitation room glanced at one another, and they subconsciously lowered their voices.

Meng Shan could not help but stand up. His favorite thing to do when he used to work in a government hospital was to persuade a difficult patient to receive surgery by performing a successful surgery before the patient’s eyes.