Chapter 1218 - With All Their Might
For this purpose, they found twenty "blood cattle"—donors whose blood type matched Jin Wushun's—who would supply plasma to maintain her normal blood volume until they reached Lingao. Plasma and saline solution flowed into her body through an intravenous line that Ning Jinghai had personally opened. Medical staff carefully flushed this lifeline with precious 1% heparin to prevent clot formation.
It could only be attributed to luck. A week later, when the ship arrived at Lingao, granulation tissue had gradually begun forming on Jin Wushun's wounds. The moment she came ashore, she was transported by the waiting transfer team directly to Bairren General Hospital.
When Bairren General Hospital was originally designed, no one had thought to include a dedicated burn ward. When the first serious scald patient—a boiler worker injured by an exploding boiler—arrived alive as their inaugural such case, the hospital temporarily repurposed the then relatively empty infectious disease ward for treatment convenience. With its clean-dirty separation design, it converted nicely into an isolation burn ward. This became one of the nascent medical system's early lessons learned.
Subsequently, burn patients grew increasingly numerous—at the peak, they actually had double-digit burn and scald patients receiving treatment simultaneously. As a result, they had to specifically expand the burn department's ward. Setting aside political propaganda factors, naturalized citizens capable of working in factories were the transmigration nation's precious assets, and their work injury medical care was entirely covered by the Senate. For a while, this left Comrade Ma Qianzhu rather embarrassed when reviewing Health Department accounts forwarded from Wudaokou.
After Jin Wushun was admitted to the ward, Ning Jinghai still felt pessimistic about her situation. During the voyage, antibiotics, bacteriophages, polymyxin... the drugs loaded onto the 901 had waged a fierce tug-of-war against the high fever and sepsis born of infection. Yet in the second week after Jin Wushun arrived in Lingao, though the dead skin on her burns had almost completely sloughed off, her sepsis kept recurring. Laboratory tests indicated that Jin Wushun might become the first naturalized citizen in this timeline to develop antibiotic resistance.
At this point, Jin Wushun's overall condition was relatively stable. After consultation, the transmigrator doctors all understood that although she had missed the optimal window for early skin grafting surgery, applying skin grafts as soon as possible to seal the wounds would cut off the source of sepsis and restore her life.
However, on how to proceed with the next phase of treatment, Lingao General Hospital's handful of transmigrator doctors had a disagreement. At the previous consultation, Shi Niaoren had proposed that both of Jin Wushun's hands were seriously injured—especially her left hand, which was quite severe and healing slowly. Therefore, the sepsis likely originated from the left hand, which should be amputated. But Ning Jinghai believed that although the left hand showed severe infection, with knife wound surfaces all over her body still unhealed and infected, the left hand infection was only part of the problem. Moreover, the degree of hand infection wasn't extremely severe and remained confined to the distal end of the upper limb. Blaming the systemic sepsis on the left hand alone lacked sufficient evidence.
The debate over this issue continued for several days, with no clear treatment plan emerging from consultations. In the meantime, they continued only targeted treatment for the sepsis. Fortunately, in this timeline, antibiotic resistance among various microorganisms wasn't yet widespread. The strains and antibiotics they'd brought were numerous and varied, still offering multiple options for treatment. Moreover, the Planning Commission had already notified them that many old-timeline antibiotics were approaching their expiration dates and were no longer under first-tier controlled use—which added more tools for treatment.
Shi Niaoren donned an isolation gown and entered the ward. Ning Jinghai and several other transmigrator doctors were already present.
Jin Wushun lay in bed, both arms wrapped in bandages. An IV drip continuously infused saline, glucose, and antibiotics into her veins. Her face had shrunken a full size, gaunt and sallow. But her spirits seemed good.
"Chief... good..." Seeing Dr. Shi enter, Jin Wushun tried to raise her head and greet him in her still-substandard Mandarin.
"Don't be polite. Just call me Doctor." Director Shi suppressed the thought: Can't you make your Mandarin a bit more standard? "How are you feeling today?"
It was the customary small talk, but it had to be asked.
Though Jin Wushun's pronunciation wasn't great, she could understand simple conversations well enough.
"I'm... fine... no problem," she said with an effort at smiling.
Shi Niaoren smiled and nodded. He reached out his hand, and a nurse immediately placed Jin Wushun's chart into it. He leafed through the recent days' records: the patient's sepsis had improved, indicating the previous targeted treatment was effective.
"The situation is acceptable."
"So I believe there's no need for amputation. We should immediately begin preparing for skin grafting surgery to seal the wounds and cut off the source of infection as soon as possible," Ning Jinghai said.
"All right, proceed according to your treatment plan." Shi Niaoren was preoccupied with other matters and no longer dwelt on this. He found the situation acceptable. He understood Ning Jinghai's thinking very clearly: preserving an intact hero was more demonstrative of the Senate's greatness and omnipotence than preserving a disabled hero. As for himself, he was more concerned with saving this poor girl's life.
"For the skin grafting surgery, I plan to harvest a flap from the posterior interosseous artery of the patient's forearm and transplant it to the wound," Ning Jinghai explained. "The advantage is that it reduces the number of surgeries—given her current physical condition, she probably can't withstand too many operations."
Shi Niaoren knew that conventional treatment typically used abdominal flap transplant surgery. But that required multiple operations and often necessitated thinning the flap. Hence Ning Jinghai had conceived this alternative approach.
"But doing it this way will leave ugly scars on her forearm, and it could affect her arm joint mobility. She'll also need scar release surgery and physical therapy. The recovery time will be very long, and it will probably be difficult to fully restore all function," Shi Niaoren observed.
"Those surgeries will have to be done sooner or later—better sooner than later. We can use this case to train several physical therapists. As for time, that's not a problem. One year, two years—we'll definitely get her rehabilitated!" Ning Jinghai continued to insist. "I did advanced training in hand and foot surgery at a higher-level hospital and performed similar operations myself. I can train naturalized medical workers."
"Since that's the case, proceed according to your plan." Then Shi Niaoren nodded to Jin Wushun: "Don't worry—we'll definitely cure you."
"Thank you, Chief," Jin Wushun replied with another smile.
He had heard about this girl's story and knew that since arriving at the hospital, she hadn't complained of pain once or voiced a single grievance. He greatly admired her for it.
With the treatment plan decided, his involvement in the next steps was unnecessary. Skin grafting surgery wasn't advanced technology—back when Dr. Shi was doing surgery at a domestic hospital in the old timeline, he'd performed it himself. Not difficult—just a few hundred yuan in cost. The biggest challenge in treating burns was fighting infection. Shi Niaoren thought that Jin Wushun's treatment had only just begun.
He changed out of his isolation gown and returned to his office. Looking at the transmigrator reproductive reports and slave women examination reports on his desk, an idea occurred to him—he should have a talk with Ai Beibei.
But at that moment, Ai Beibei was occupied.
The Third Outpatient Department of Bairren General Hospital—commonly called the "Mother and Child Center"—now occupied a newly built three-story building. It consolidated Bairren General Hospital's reproductive medicine, obstetrics, and neonatal departments. Of course, these departments existed only on paper and in signage. The only person who could truly be called a doctor was Ai Beibei alone, and she was neither an obstetrician nor a pediatric specialist, with little research in reproductive medicine. She was getting by entirely on the foundation built from cramming textbooks in medical school and doing grunt work during her hospital internship.
Because prenatal checkups and hospital deliveries had proven remarkably effective—both maternal and infant mortality rates had dropped dramatically—this policy had quickly been promoted throughout Lingao. Not only did naturalized employee families follow it, but ordinary naturalized families also began accepting this practice. Of course, non-acceptance wasn't an option: traditional midwives had been completely banned in Lingao. If midwives didn't attend study classes to retrain and officially join the health system as certified birth attendants, they had to quit. If they continued delivering babies privately, they'd be arrested and sent to Fu Youdi for "thought reform."
This welcome development meant the Mother and Child Center's workload was rising steeply. The first and second floors were packed with pregnant women and their accompanying family members, while obstetrics occupied the third floor. No one could say when things might quiet down there on any given day.
Right now, Ai Beibei and two other naturalized birth attendants were scrubbing up. A thought flashed through her mind: How annoying—why do women giving birth always come in clusters? Either nobody delivers, or a whole bunch deliver at once. Sometimes, for hours or even days, work proceeded in an orderly fashion, delivering babies one by one at a leisurely pace. Then suddenly six women in labor were all ready to deliver at once, causing utter chaos. That's exactly what was happening now.
And all six women in labor were "maids." Ai Beibei sighed silently. Poor women! Technically, transmigrators' children should be delivered under her personal supervision, but right now she simply couldn't manage—not just her, but even the naturalized birth attendants she'd personally trained weren't enough.
She'd originally thought that accepting midwives could fill part of the birth attendant gap, but she was quickly disappointed. Lingao was a small place with only two "professional" midwives. Some women who weren't really "midwives" but occasionally helped with births lacked even the most basic delivery and birthing knowledge—basically just boiling hot water and cutting the umbilical cord. When faced with difficult births, they could only burn incense and drink ash water. They had no training value whatsoever. So she'd had to pull some people from the already-stretched nursing resources to learn the birth attendant curriculum.
(End of Chapter)