Great Doctor Ling Ran

Ouyang Kan squirmed awkwardly, and the stool he was sitting on was creaking from the movement of his buttocks.

He was tall and was of above-average weight. Right now, he was curling himself up like a ball, and he looked like a large chunk of flesh that weighed heavily on the tiny stool. At least, it looked like this from Su Jiafu’s perspective.

Unless the surgeons had to carry out the surgery while sitting down, the stools in the operating theater were prepared for anesthetists, anyway. At times, the surgery would go on for too long, or the anesthetists might have been working on a few consecutive surgeries. This was when they would line up two stools and prop their legs up with their spine against the wall so that they could take a nap.

Of course, this was against the rules. But it felt tremendously good too. Su Jiafu could not stand it the most when surgeons snatched stools from anesthetists. Surgeons had snatched way too many things from anesthetists, such as popularity and opportunities to show off. How did they even have the audacity to snatch the anesthetists’ stools?

That was so unreasonable!

“Associate Chief Physician Wei is here,” the attending physician from the Department of Anesthesiology suddenly said. He immediately lowered his head and pretended to be busy.

Ouyang Kan followed the attending physician’s gaze, and saw the scene behind the long, protruding glass wall of the visitation room upstairs. Not only was Wei Qing, the experienced associate chief physician from the General Surgery Department, here, but the director of the General Surgery Department and two other associate chief physicians were also here.

Ouyang Kan smiled nonchalantly, and his lips betrayed him. “This visitation room built by the Emergency Medical Center is truly cool.”

“I heard that Yunli Medical Company specially hired a team just to build it, and the signature fee alone was three million RMB.” The attending physician from the Department of Anesthesiology clicked his tongue as he gossiped. Anesthetists were either gossiping or getting high, and from a certain perspective, it was safer for them to gossip.

Ouyang Kan did not really believe this. “Isn’t three million RMB a bit too much? Do people make so much more money building houses compared to digging out patients’ intestines nowadays?”

“Don’t put it this way. Digging intestines sounds too pleasant.” The chief physician from the Department of Anesthesiology chuckled. Because of age differences, he did not end up making the joke that surgeons were shit diggers.

“Then, how much money did Department Director Huo spend for this visitation room?” Ouyang Kan did not want to talk about shit digging either, so he changed the topic.

The attending physician from the Department of Anesthesiology smiled. “Probably a few million RMB.”

“Yunli Medical Company made an unprofitable deal? Seriously?”

“Why would it be? The cost to build this visitation room isn’t that high. Aside from this, look at the number of hospitals that want a visitation room too after seeing this.” The anesthetist laughed scornfully. “The hospital’s paying for the construction of the visitation room, but Yunli Medical Company gets to boast about it. You’re a surgeon, so you will certainly agree with me, right? Hehe…”

Even as a surgeon himself, Ouyang Kan did not how to defend surgeons in this case. Among all the people in the hospital, surgeons definitely liked boasting the most, followed by associate chief physicians in the Orthopedics Department.

“Yunli Medical Company is making a lot of money.” The attending physician from the Department of Anesthesiology continued gossiping. “Not only are other hospitals within Changxi Province interested in building a visitation room now, but there are also hospitals from other provinces nearby who engaged their services. I heard that Yunli Medical Company has even expanded its services to Beijing and Shanghai. The money they put in to hire the team to build the visitation room has returned to them in many folds.”

“They’re pretty bold, aren’t they?”

“This is why they’re so popular. For example, our…” The attending physician from the Department of Anesthesiology pouted and gestured with his chin at the visitation room upstairs. “Yunli Medical Company supports us in using drugs from other medical companies. They let us pick out whatever drugs we think are the best, and they would fight for the distributorship of those drugs. I reckon that such a company definitely has an extremely bright future as long as they stay in the industry. All the drugs they distribute are excellent drugs that have stood the test of time, and in the end, we’ll have no choice but to use drugs distributed by them.”

Ouyang Kan nodded quietly, but he did not say anything in reply. After all, there are doctors from the General Surgery Department upstairs, and to them, medical companies and the choice of drugs were sensitive topics. It was not even appropriate for doctors from the same department to talk about this.

The attending physician realized that he had gone overboard too, so he quickly changed the topic. “The General Surgery Department pays quite a lot of attention to this surgery, don’t they? Even the department director is here.”

“How can they not?” Ouyang Kan smiled glumly. “If my memory isn’t failing me, this is the first time radical gastrectomy for stomach cancer is carried out using a laparoscope in Yun Hua Hospital.”

“The first time?” The attending physician from the Department of Anesthesiology looked at Ouyang Kan in astonishment.

“I don’t believe in this method, and statistically, there isn’t any advantage to using this method either.” Ouyang Kan was experiencing quite a lot of complicated emotions. “The Japanese started using this surgical method in the nineties. It has been more than twenty years since then, but the results have been mediocre. They themselves don’t even know why the results are like that. Aside from Japan, only a small number of countries are doing this in an experimental manner.”

Every time a new technology was employed, it was always a step by step process. This was especially true when it came to surgical methods, as they were related to matters of life and death, and they relied a lot on the experiences of surgeons themselves.

In short, even if a person were to discount developing countries like China, a large number of new technologies and techniques were employed in the medical centers of more than thirty developed countries around the globe every year. And medical personnel from every country would be faced with the questions of whether to learn these new techniques, how to learn these new techniques and how to start employing these new technologies. It could be said to be a whole new world.

Aside from this, to learn these new techniques, they could not just copy other people directly. They had to get to know these techniques and study them. It was a process.

Take radical gastrectomy using a laparoscope as an example. Hospitals from all over the world were relatively slow in picking up this surgical method. Not only was it because this surgical method was rather hard, but it was also because experts from all over the world had differing opinions.

On one hand, doctors who were proponents for open surgery believed that because of how rich the blood circulation to the stomach was and how complicated the lymphatic structure in the stomach was, chances of recurrence were extremely high if a laparoscope was used. On the other hand, doctors who believed in using a laparoscope proposed that all abdominal surgeries could be carried out using a laparoscope. It was just a matter of whether it was difficult or not.

All proponents for radical gastrectomy for stomach cancer using a laparoscope were young doctors below the age of forty or fifty. However, Ouyang Kan was a conservative doctor who had operated on almost a thousand patients with stomach cancer via open surgery. Of course, he was reluctant to use a laparoscope. He was a little too old to learn a new trick too, even if he wanted to.

However, Ouyang Kan was willing to see Ling Ran do it. It was just that he did not really believe in Ling Ran’s ability to do it well.

“It’s not so easy to act as the pioneer for something.” Ouyang Kan glanced at the visitation room upstairs before he immediately looked away.

“Didn’t you say that some surgeons in Japan have done it before?”

“There were 2,600 cases in ten years, which means that only a few doctors are doing it. You know how Japanese hospitals are kind of divided into sects.” Ouyang Kan paused for a moment, and this was when someone opened the door of the operating theater and wheeled the patient in.

The circulating nurse did not need anyone to bark orders at her. She gently checked the patient’s name and other details before she inserted a catheter for venous access. She then placed the aspirator beside the patient’s head, performed urinary catheterization and adjusted the patient’s body.

At the same time, the anesthetist and his assistant started getting busy for real.

For ordinary surgeries, there would only be one anesthetist, and the circulating nurse would need to help out. However, since Su Jiafu was acting as the attending physician’s assistant today, the attending physician was able to do things very smoothly.

“Anesthetics should be administered by two doctors, to begin with,” the attending physician from the Department of Anesthesiology marveled at how smoothly things were going, and he saw that Ouyang Kan who was standing beside him was starting to carry out preoperative preparations too. Ouyang Kan’s maneuvers were so skillful that it made the attending physician’s heartache. Ouyang Kan knew every movement by heart, and the attending physician wondered how many years Ouyang Kan had spent on being an assistant to be able to do all the tasks assistants were required to do instinctively. Only after being an assistant for a long time did he get to act as the chief surgeon, and he eventually made it in life and became an associate chief physician…