Great Doctor Ling Ran

Dong Sheng looked around in front of Lower Groove Clinic, and his face was full of doubt.

“Dong Sheng, why don’t you go in?” A member of the neighborhood recognized Dong Sheng by his saffron robe. Although the Twelve Fountains Temple was small, it was still quite famous in the neighborhood. In the past, when the old monk still came down from the mountain, everyone in Lower Groove knew him.

After Dong Sheng bowed to greet the neighbor, he said in puzzlement, “The smell that’s coming out of this place reminds me of the new year. I’m worried that I may have disturbed something.”

The neighbor was stunned and also tried to sniff the air with his nose. He could not help but smile and say, “How could it be the new year? This should be the smell of steamed salted pork in wine with sautéed potatoes.”

With a dumb look on his face, Dong Sheng pondered for quite some time before he suddenly realized what the neighbor had said. “It is the smell of the world. Thank you for clearing my doubts, patron.”

The neighbor laughed. “You already know all the Buddhist stories at your age, huh?”

“Patron, you mean Buddhist allegory, right?”

“Dong Sheng…” The neighbor suddenly stretched his hands out and patted the young novice monk’s head. “The more you read, the less intelligent you will be. The more you grow up, the less cute you will be.”

“Patron… are you giving me an allegory?” The young novice monk was confused.

When he raised his head again, his head felt slightly cool. The neighbor had just left.

The young novice monk looked at the plate above Lower Groove Clinic again before he knocked on the door and entered.

The door of Lower Groove Clinic’s main entrance was opened halfway. When Dong Sheng entered, he saw that the clinic was fully occupied with patients. The patients chatted and laughed as they usually did in the clinic.

In the middle of the courtyard was a straight stainless steel pot, which was filled with sautéed potatoes. Next to the pot was a big bowl containing red sauce. There was a stack of small bowls and a few bottles of toothpicks next to the big bowl.

Dong Sheng understood that the food was free for the public to eat. When some families in villages gave alms to others, they would do it the same way, though the people who visited them may not be as great as the crowd in Lower Groove Clinic.

“Dong Sheng, we thought that you’d only be coming in the next few days.” Ling Jiezhou pushed over a small trolley with another pot of sautéed potatoes.

“Patron Ling… may I know what day it is today?”

Ling Jiezhou approached him and reached out naturally to rub Dong Sheng’s head. “Why haven’t you grown taller?” he asked.

“Patron Ling…” Dong Sheng wore an expression that said, “I am only being obedient right now because my head is in your evil clutches.” He then said, “I measured my height a few days ago. I’ve grown 0.31 inches taller.”

Ling Jiezhou laughed after he heard him. “That should be the difference between you wearing shoes and not wearing shoes, right? When Ling Ran was about your age, he grew much faster.”

The young novice monk’s facial expression changed slightly. He tried his best to recall the time when he measured his height. He wondered if he had shoes on back then.

“Have a bowl of potatoes. The bowl of sauce at the side may seem red, but it’s not spicy at all. It contains around a dozen types of seasonings, and it’s a secret recipe passed down from our ancestors.” Ling Jiezhou was being so friendly that he gave Dong Sheng a bowl of potatoes, and he also used a spoon to put a scoop of secret sauce on top of the dish. “It’s always best to eat the potatoes with the sauce. Remember to let the potatoes cool down before you eat them. Don’t burn your tongue,” he said.

“Thank you, Patron Ling.”

“Such a good boy. Do you want to massage the customers later? There are quite a number of people in the neighborhood who are fond of your skill.”

“Really?” The young novice monk felt surprised and delighted.

In the temple, there would sometimes be patrons who came to pray. If they wanted a monk to pray for them, they would also ask for his master. No one had ever asked for him.

Ling Jiezhou replied firmly, “Certainly. The problems that our neighbors have are common illnesses they’ve had for a long time. The duration of your massage is quite long, and the fee is reasonable, of course they’ll like you.” Ling Jiezhou smiled and asked, “I’ll hang up a board for you later, is that all right?”

“Thank you very much, Patron Ling,” the young novice monk quickly bowed and thanked him.

Ling Jiezhou put down the things in his hands and went to the storeroom immediately. He then hung a board on the wall in the corridor with the words [10 RMB for a five-minute massage. Receive service upon arrival.] After that, he took down the board that said [25 RMB for a two-minute massage. Please make an appointment beforehand.]

After Dong Sheng ate the sautéed potatoes, he wiped his mouth and proceeded to help out.

There was a lot of work to do in the clinic every day. Just changing transfusion bottles alone could make Juan Zi very busy. She got lighter by 0.66 pounds every time she came to work each day. Dong Sheng helped to change the bedsheets, sweep the floor, wipe the table, and change the pillows, which he took out from the storage room.

After he was done with the basic work, Dong Sheng got the people from the neighborhood who wanted to receive massages to sit down. He was busy until noon before he had any time to rest. He lay down comfortably in the reclining chair in the corridor.

Next to him was Ling Ran, who was just about to start a new round of the game on his phone. A voice rang out from his phone, “Five seconds until the enemy’s arrival on the battlefield.”

Dong Sheng was slightly confused. He looked at Ling Ran and asked, “Doctor Ling, is it because I’m massaging all the people in the neighborhood, so you have nothing to do now?”

“No,” Ling Ran replied directly, “There are too few people who want to be massaged in our neighborhood. I can’t gather a whole group of people at once. It doesn’t interest me.”

“Oh.” Dong Sheng could not help but feel relieved and continued to lean against the reclining chair. He watched as Ling Ran play his game, and he waited for about one minute before he saw Ling Ran’s hands leave the screen. Dong Sheng immediately asked, “Doctor Ling, there was a problem with the twisting and lifting technique I used earlier. I don’t feel like I got the right position…”

“The twisting and lifting technique can be quite hard for you. Perhaps you can try the pulling technique first. Come and try it on me.” Dong Sheng sat up immediately and massaged Ling Ran’s neck with the pulling technique.

Ling Ran enjoyed the massage while he taught Dong Sheng. “That’s right. That’s the way. You can exert more force with your pulls. Find the correct position, and your thumbs should move up immediately… Yes… Wait…”

The character in Ling Ran’s game had been revived. He held his phone with both his hands, and he looked stern as well as attentive.

Dong Sheng also sat down and rested for a while, watching Ling Ran play the game.

In less than two minutes, Ling Ran’s phone was thrown on the table.

Dong Sheng immediately got up, put his hands on Ling Ran’s neck, and said, “Doctor Ling, I feel it now. Is this the right way?”

“Yes…

“Not bad…

“Continue…”

Ling Ran trained Dong Sheng for one whole day. In the afternoon, he went to the hospital and operated on three severed finger cases before he became the assistant for Chief Physician Wang Haiyang from the Hand Surgery Department in an Achilles tendon repair surgery.

Chief Physician Wang Haiyang had heard of Ling Ran’s outstanding performance under Zhu Tongyi, so he came up with some ideas and also decided to access Ling Ran’s skills.

Ling Ran did not care about that. For him, it would be fine as long as there was a surgery to perform.

If he had to point anything out, it was that there were fewer hospital beds in the Emergency Department than the Orthopedic and Sports Medicine Center. No matter what, the latter contained a total of one hundred and eighty hospital beds while the Emergency Department had only around seventy beds. Half of them were even extra beds. Those beds were not even legally theirs.

If they compared the ability to add extra beds, the Emergency Department could only add up to two hundred beds at most. By that time, everyone would have to walk sideways. However, it was totally different in the Orthopedic and Sports Medicine Center. They were a large department with around thirty doctors who occupied a huge building. When the need arose, they could easily offer up two hundred to three hundred extra beds. Even though they may not have enough medical staff, with Zhu Tongyi’s reputation, they could still attract hundreds of doctors to come over to help. All they needed to do was make a number of phone calls.

The nurses could even be recruited from an outsourcing company. It was only a matter of how troublesome it would be for them to do so.

The only good side of the Emergency Department was that the doctors had low demands for hospital beds.

In specialist departments, all those who were ranked as attending physicians or higher would treat hospital beds as something equally important to their lives if they needed to perform surgeries. In order to maintain a balance in the relationships among doctors, some of the hospitals would assign a fixed number of hospital beds to them. The number of hospital beds assigned to each doctor would be arranged very well.

In comparison, the doctors in the Emergency Department did not care about that. The more severe the illness of a patient, the more they had to send the patient away once they saved him. One such example was the Level 1 critical patients. Regardless of whether they suffered from cerebral infarction, acute myocardial infarction, or even haemorrhagic shock, they would still be sent over to other departments like the Neurology Department and Cardiology Department.

Only doctors like Huo Congjun who worked part-time in the Trauma and Burn Surgery Department would have a higher request for hospital beds. At this point, he was actually doing the work of a specialist department.

In order to save up on hospital beds, Ling Ran gave up his habit of performing surgeries. He would only operate on patients when they appeared with three severed fingers. He would never let the patient wait for him. He surrendered himself to the hospital so completely that he treated the hospital as his home. He could do whatever the hospital and patients asked him to.

Of course, patients with two severed fingers did not have to wait long in the Hand Surgery Department. The Hand Surgery Department was a big department, and naturally, the competition between doctors was even greater. Once they saw how Ling Ran happily performed finger replantations every day, some people could not help but imitate him.

At six in the evening, Ling Ran scanned through the electronic medical records. He checked the medical records and prescriptions over the past few days before he praised Yu Yuan and said, “Yu Yuan wrote the most detailed records.”

Yu Yuan raised her head proudly. She smiled and snuck a peek at Lu Wenbin as well as Ma Yanlin before she said, “They spent their time on eating.”

Lu Wenbin and Ma Yanlin were shocked.

“We didn’t!” both of them said in unison. They were stunned for a while before they spoke at the same time again.

“I’m always reading research articles even when I’m cooking pork trotters.”

“Very few people eat salted fish in packets nowadays.”

Both of them looked at each other, as though their thoughts contradicted each other, their talents merged together, and their desires pushed down on their shoulders…

“Yu Yuan can type very fast,” Lu Wenbin sighed and decided to praise Yu Yuan first.

Ma Yanlin seemed to understand. “We type really slowly,” he added.

Yu Yuan glanced at them proudly. “My fastest typing speed is two hundred words per minute. It’s not fast at all.”

“Two hundred words in a minute? We can’t even do that even if we copy and paste our words.” Lu Wenbin found a breakthrough for them.

Ma Yanlin wore an evil smile and said, “Why don’t we just let Yu Yuan write all the medical records? Our writing speed’s slow, and the quality of our writing isn’t very good for research papers too. Why don’t we distribute the tasks?”

“No!” Yu Yuan was the shocked one this time.

“Don’t go back home first. We need to receive a patient later,” Huo Congjun shouted from his office and asked someone to make the announcement through the loudspeaker.

Ling Ran and the others had no choice but to stand still and look at Huo Congjun.

It was normal for doctors to work overtime, but an announcement like that was rare.

“The patient is being sent by a helicopter. A few phone calls have been made to the hospital director. Be more careful when you receive the patient!” Huo Congjun appointed Ling Ran while he briefed them and said, “You’ll come with me to receive the helicopter. Can you just be there but not say anything?”

“Sure.”

“A few leaders in the hospital will come with us to receive the helicopter. It’ll be more convenient for your work later if you just show your face.” Huo Congjun picked up a crumpled white coat and spoke to Ling Ran again, “Pick a newer white coat to portray the Emergency Department’s elegance… Well, you can wear yours also…”

There was an obvious crease on Ling Ran’s white coat, but no one would ever bother to look at it once he wore it on his person.

They could not tire of his handsome look, so who would actually be bothered to look at the outfit!