Great Doctor Ling Ran

Doctor Dan entered the ward after he was done reading through the medical records. He went to Bed 52 and glanced at the patient before looking at the medical record again. “Li Lu, I am Dan Ming, an attending physician from the Department of Hepatobiliary and Pancreatic Surgery of Yun Hua Hospital. You can just call me Doctor Dan. I’ll examine you now.”

Li Lu was a young woman with an oval face, and she looked to be in her mid-twenties. She did not really feel anything when she heard Doctor Dan. Instead, her mother who was sitting beside her bed was the first one to get anxious. “What’s wrong with Li Lu?”

“It’s too early to tell. I’ll carry out a few examinations first.” Doctor Dan was very courteous.

Doctors in the hospital were always relatively friendly towards the patients themselves. This was especially true when they matched the surgical methods the doctors were usually chief surgeons for. The doctors would find more comfort to be in their home ground.

Take an attending physician like Dan Ming as an example. He carried out between twenty to thirty surgeries per month, and he operated for two or three days a week on average. This meant that he operated on two or three patients on the days he carried out surgeries, and he only needed to deal with two or three patients on the day before and after he performed surgeries. It was not very stressful for him in terms of communicating with the patients.

After reading Li Lu’s medical record, Dan Ming was already 70% sure that she had acute cholecystitis. However, he still needed to carry out further examinations before he could decide on whether the patient required surgery, and if the patient could be operated on. And before he obtained those results, Dan Ming could not give a definite diagnosis.

Even though Li Lu’s mother was a little anxious, there was nothing she could do. She muttered, “Such an unlucky year. She just injured her hand, and before her hand has even recovered, a doctor from the Department of Hepatobiliary and Pancreatic Surgery is suddenly here.”

Doctor Dan still had a smile on his face. He said, “Come, I’ll carry out Murphy’s sign [1] on you.”

Li Lu looked at Doctor Dan in confusion.

“Lie on your back with your knees bent. I’ll palpate your abdomen.” Doctor Dan guided Li Lu’s movements while he drew the curtains around the hospital bed.

Most of the rooms in the Emergency Department of Yun Hua Hospital had three or four beds.

All the rooms were painted a light blue, and there was a curtain track above each bed. After the dark blue curtains were drawn, a mini-examination cubicle would be formed.

Doctor Dan did not ask Li Lu’s family members to leave. He waited for Li Lu to get into the right position before he gently pressed the area below Li Lu’s right ribs with his left palm, with his thumb at the position of her gallbladder. He then said, “Take a slow and deep breath.”

“Doctor Ling performed this examination on me just now, I think.” Li Lu frowned a little.

“I need to re-examine you.” Doctor Dan nodded and said nothing else.

In the hospital, it was normal for the same examination to be carried out multiple times. The main reason was simply because none of the doctors trusted their colleagues. This was because every doctor knew that it was possible for their colleagues to make mistakes.

Surgeons were the most distrustful of them all. Even in medical school nowadays, lecturers tirelessly ground into their students the practice of examining patients with their own hands and question anything written in medical records.

Usually, none of the surgeons trusted other surgeons.

Since Murphy’s sign was not an examination that required any money, Doctor Dan definitely wanted to perform it with his own hands. In the past, if a patient’s Murphy’s sign was positive, he or she would be considered eligible for surgery already.

Of course, nowadays, it was no longer so simple.

When Li Lu’s inflamed gallbladder touched Doctor Dan’s finger as he pushed downwards, Li Lu immediately flinched from the pain. It was exactly what that happened when Ling Ran carried out the examination.

At this moment, both Li Lu and her mother knew that the situation was not promising.

Doctor Dan nodded and said, “Preliminary examinations show that you have acute cholecystitis, but it isn’t very serious. We can try to reduce the inflammation first before deciding the next step. I’ll arrange for an abdominal CT scan for you, and you can go on ahead and get it done.”

“Alright.” Li Lu’s mother immediately agreed. She then added, “It’s not dangerous if it’s acute, right?”

“For us, acute cholecystitis is just a minor illness.”

Li Lu’s mother breathed a sigh of relief and said, “That’s good, that’s good. Sigh, this is an unlucky year. I make Li Lu soup thrice a day, including pigeon soup, soup made from old hens, soup made from old ducks, and squid soup. In the end, she still got struck by another illness…”

“It’s because you fed her with too much protein.” Doctor Dan shook his head in resignation.

“Too much?”

“Yup. People who eat too much or eat too well are easily susceptible to illnesses such as pancreatitis and cholecystitis.”

Li Lu’s mother froze for a moment and suddenly said furiously, “It’s all my husband’s fault. I told him to plant flowers, but he wanted to rear chickens and ducks instead. And we have a perfectly fine and beautiful lotus pond, but he uses it to rear squids. If it weren’t for the fact that he reared so many animals, I wouldn’t have been so eager to make soup.”

Doctor Dan went into a daze when he heard that, and only said in envy after a while, “Isn’t life in the countryside amazing? We see the sky when we raise our heads and see nothing but concrete when we lower our heads. In the hospital, I work for twenty hours at one go, and by the time I get home, even the markets are closed.”

“It’s the same for me.” Li Lu’s mother sighed and said, “I live at Great Sealed Bivouac, just a few miles away from the hospital. We bought four villas and there are a few hectares of land in total. At that time, I thought that we could plant some vegetables and rear some livestock, but it really could not compare to the countryside. First, the quality of air is different…”

Doctor Dan could not help but think about the price of houses in Yun Hua, the price of villas in Great Sealed Bivouac, and the fact that those villas came with a few hectares of land. Even his gallbladder shuddered at the thought of this.

Doctor Dan suddenly thought of something and said, “Why don’t we do this? I’ll take her blood pressure and heart rate again…”

Five minutes later, Doctor Dan quietly left the ward and said to Lu Wenbin, “Transfer the patient to our department.”

Lu Wenbin naturally did as he said.

The words emergency in Emergency Department and acute as in acute cholecystitis denote a sense of urgency, but that did not mean that doctors in the Emergency Department would need to perform this surgery. At least so far, none of the doctors in the Emergency Department of Yun Hua Hospital was interested in treating cholecystitis. Besides, other than doctors like Ling Ran, ordinary emergency medical specialists did not have the desire to scramble for surgeries with other specialist departments.

A doctor often needed to participate in a few hundred surgeries to master a new surgical method, and this would take ordinary doctors three or four years. It could be said to be a relatively major change in direction in their medical life.

Ling Ran watched as Lu Wenbin signed the patient transfer form and countersigned it. He then stared at the vacant bed in a daze.

“Don’t tell me that you want to discover some other illnesses in the other patients and transfer them to other departments,” Lu Wenbin said in a dark tone.

Ling Ran chuckled. “That’s quite impossible, isn’t it?”

“This was what you decided on, right?” Lu Wenbin’s lips twitched, and he said solemnly, “Doctor Ling, the main point of this matter is that you shouldn’t have had that thought, to begin with, isn’t it?”

“What’s wrong with examining our own patients and discovering their hidden illnesses?” Ling Ran answered Lu Wenbin’s question with a question.

Lu Wenbin’s brain stopped working for a few seconds. “I was almost convinced by you.”

Ling Ran said, “Logic is never wrong.”

“So, are we doing internal medicine diagnosis as our part-time job now?” Lu Wenbin heaved a loud sigh. He grabbed Ling Ran’s arm and said as they walked out of the ward area, “Doctor Ling, I’m just saying, but other than operating on patients, don’t you want to do something else?”

“Such as?”

“Buy a house of your own?” Lu Wenbin could not help but smile as he said this. “You have actually earned quite a lot of money from surgery fees. You just need to add a bit more to it to be able to afford the down payment of a house. I’m just saying, but women nowadays want their boyfriends to have cars and houses by the time they get married. It’s even worse when it comes to blind dates. If you don’t have a car and a house, people won’t even want to introduce you to their daughters. Anyway, it wouldn’t do…”

Ling Ran hummed in acknowledgment and did not really react to what Lu Wenbin had just said.

“Hey, Doctor Ling, don’t dismiss this matter. It’s very important to buy a house. Even though your family has a house now, you can’t just stay at home with your wife after you get married, right? Girls nowadays are very picky. All of them don’t want to stay with their mothers-in-law. You’ll have to buy a house in the end, so why don’t you buy one earlier? It’ll take a lot of pressure off you to buy a house earlier because a few years later, you would have paid off quite a large chunk of a loan.” Lu Wenbin looked at Ling Ran, and his gaze sparkled.

Ling Ran hummed in acknowledgment again, but he still did not really react to what Lu Wenbin had just said.

Lu Wenbin could not hold it in anymore, and after walking quietly for a while, he said, “Doctor Ling, I plan to pay the down payment and buy a secondhand house in front of our hospital. Do you want to go and take a look with me?”

Ling Ran finally realized what Lu Wenbin was trying to say. He asked, “You’re buying a house?”

“Yeah, I’ve just accumulated money for the down payment.” Lu Wenbin flashed a big smile and said, “Houses are not only for you to live in. It’ll also come in handy after you get married when your kids go to school…”

“Hi, Doctor Ling.”

“Doctor Ling, we bought a really huge prawn today. What time will you be going to the canteen? We’ll ask the chef to cook it for you.”

“It’s a fifteen-inch tiger prawn, an extremely beautiful one.”

The young nurses who were walking head-on towards them smiled as they waved and extended their fair arms to gesture how long and fat the tiger prawn was.

As Lu Wenbin looked at their gestures and fell helplessly silent.

At this moment, Ling Ran said, “I plan to carry out surgeries in the afternoon and will just drink some milk. I’ll eat the prawns at night.”

“No problem, we’ll ask the chef to slowly thaw the prawn then.” The two nurses waved and left happily.

“Could you send a box of pine nuts to the nurses’ station on my behalf?” Ling Ran asked Lu Wenbin offhandedly.

Lu Wenbin lowered his head and muttered, “I’m already buying a house. Why do I still have to be the middleman for this sort of transaction…?”