Chapter 92: Bairen General Hospital

It was no big deal to take in a maid. If she was as good as she said, she could be given to Chen Tianxiong to serve him—after all, he had no woman.

“Alright, have her come over tomorrow for a look,” Wen Tong said nonchalantly.

“Thank you for your grace, master!” Ah Zhu arched her body seductively and slowly slid down towards Wen Tong’s groin, gently biting his member, her tongue lightly licking it. A shiver ran through his body, and he immediately became erect again.

I’ll have to teach her some new tricks in the future, Wen Tong’s consciousness gradually blurred under Ah Zhu’s tongue. This thought flashed through his mind before he fell into the ecstasy of climax.

“The director is making his rounds!”

As the head nurse’s high-pitched voice echoed through the corridor, every ward and office in Bairen General Hospital tensed up. This was the weekly Monday morning director’s rounds, which all chief physicians were required to attend. The first batch of nursing school graduates, who had just had their capping ceremony and been promoted to nurses, and their successors, the second-year nursing interns, quickly opened the ward doors and stood in the corridor, holding their breath and standing respectfully, awaiting the arrival of the god-like figures in their eyes.

As the doors of the chief physicians’ office building opened, Shi Niaoren, one hand in the pocket of his brand-new white coat, his broad shoulders leading the way, strode forward. A step behind him were the department heads, their faces tense, their white coats ironed to a crisp—ironing the chief physicians’ clothes was one of the duties of the nurses at Bairen General Hospital—stethoscopes hanging around their necks, gleaming.

“Good morning, doctors!” Led by the head nurse, Zhang Ziyi, all the nurses and interns bowed and greeted them in unison. The scene, though small, was quite spectacular.

“Good morning. Thank you for your hard work!” Shi Niaoren nodded. At this moment, all the department heads were always sullen—after all, there was only one person who could say, “Thank you for your hard work, comrades.” The inspection team was, as usual, led by the highest-ranking official, the People’s Commissar for Health and Director of Bairen General Hospital, Shi Niaoren. With the titles of a US-trained Ph.D. and a professor of infectious diseases, Shi Niaoren held a high position even in this new time and space.

The entire inpatient building had three floors. The first and second floors were general wards, with ten rooms per floor, each with six beds. The third floor was the “high-cadre” ward—actually for the exclusive use of the transmigrators—also with ten rooms, but each with only three beds.

Currently, the general wards housed about thirty patients, mostly with various muscle contusions, fractures, and infected wounds, as well as common illnesses like upper respiratory infections and acute gastroenteritis. In the past few days, a new batch of wounded had been admitted: the sailors and artillerymen injured on the Great Whale during the Battle of Juhua Islet. Their injuries were mostly minor burns and puncture wounds from iron fragments.

Most of them did not require hospitalization; they were fine after their wounds were treated. Only a few had more serious injuries. Such injuries, as long as they did not affect major blood vessels or organs, were not difficult to treat. Even treating inflammation was much easier than in the other time and space—sulfa drugs were basically a miracle cure.

The only thing that troubled the doctors was the tetanus antitoxin—it was becoming increasingly scarce, and its shelf life was limited. Once it was used up, the wounded would have to rely on luck.

For general patients, the rounds consisted of checking the medical records at the head of the bed and asking if there were any abnormalities. Even with such basic and simple tasks, Shi Niaoren often found problems.

“Why doesn’t this patient have a morning temperature reading?!” The director was furious again—he had reminded them so many times! “Who was on duty?”

“Reporting to the master—”

“Director!” Shi Niaoren roared. “Say it again: call me director!” From this tone, he knew it was a nursing school student. A full-fledged nurse would not call him “master.”

“It was me—” The nursing student who was called out wore a blue nurse’s uniform. Since she was not a full-fledged nurse, she only wore a blue triangular headscarf.

“Who are you?”

“Hou Qing.”

Hou Qing looked thin and small. In the other time and space, she would probably be considered only fifteen or sixteen, but she was actually in her early twenties, an old maid in this time and space. She and her brother, Hou Wenyong, were refugees recently taken in by the Guangzhou station.

“Why didn’t you take the temperature?”

“It’s… it’s too embarrassing—” The girl covered her face, looking as if she was about to cry.

It turned out that to prevent patients from biting through the thermometers, temperatures were taken rectally, which meant the nurse had to “expose the chrysanthemum” of the patient.

It was certain that the patients were not used to it, but for these young women, born in an era where men and women were strictly segregated, to “expose the chrysanthemum” of a strange man was an even more difficult task.

There had been suggestions to start with a system of male nurses, but Shi Niaoren had vetoed it. “You all know very well: medical workers have no gender! If you can’t even cross this threshold, how can you talk about training qualified native medical personnel?”

Of course, this was not something that could be achieved overnight. At the beginning, nine out of ten new students couldn’t accept it and had to be educated slowly. Shi Niaoren sighed and said to Zhang Ziyi:

“You teach her well.”

With that, he moved on to the next bed.

“What’s wrong with this one?!”

Every time he made his rounds, he would always find some problems, either the basic temperature was forgotten, or the medical records were written incorrectly. The first batch of nursing school graduates were still very inexperienced in many aspects—they had learned in less than half a year what their counterparts in the other time and space would take four years to learn, and many of them had just become literate.

After reprimanding the nurse who made a mistake and watching her correct it on the spot, Shi Niaoren let out a breath. There’s progress. At least the nurses no longer knelt on the ground and begged for his “mercy” when he reprimanded them, as they used to. Instilling the concept of modern medicine was truly a long and arduous task.

After finishing with the general wards, the group went to the high-cadre ward, where only two people were staying.

“You Laohu, army company commander. Acute enteritis,” reported the nurse on duty, Guo Fu.

Shi Niaoren took the medical record and looked at it. Although the handwriting was crooked, the format was standard. The 6 a.m. fasting temperature was 37.4 degrees Celsius, a slight fever.

He handed the medical record to Lan Yangyang, who was a specialist in gastroenterology.

“Did he have diarrhea last night?”

“Twice.”

Lan Yangyang examined him again and asked about his condition.

This guy had gotten acute enteritis from eating wild fruit during a field exercise yesterday. His face was green when he was carried in. Lan Yangyang had been busy for half the night to get him stabilized. He was still on a glucose drip.

“It’s fine, it’s fine. I guarantee you’ll be healthy and lively again,” Shi Niaoren comforted the crestfallen You Laohu in a kind and friendly manner.

“Don’t eat anything today. Have some rice porridge tonight, rest for a night, and I guarantee you’ll be bouncing around tomorrow,” Lan Yangyang said to reassure him.

“Thank you, doctor.” You Laohu, who had always wanted to flirt with the young nurses in the hospital, had no energy left. He had no interest in the young nurse in front of him.

“When you go back, have the army club get you a duck to replenish your body, haha,” Shi Niaoren said with a smile. “Don’t eat any more wild fruit.”

“Definitely not—” You Laohu, who was usually as strong as an ox, now spoke with a weak voice. A real hero can’t withstand three bouts of diarrhea.

Shi Niaoren walked over to the other bed, his tone not so pleasant. On the bed lay a fat man, groaning, but his complexion was surprisingly good.

“I say, Fatty Xi!” Shi Niaoren was blunt from the start. This guy had been admitted after returning from the Great Whale. His injury was minor, not even requiring stitches, and certainly not meeting the criteria for hospitalization. “How long are you going to freeload here?”

“Doctor, I feel some muscle twitching. Could it be the first stage of tetanus?” he lay there, groaning.

“You’re perfectly healthy!” Shi Niaoren said. “How many times have I told you, all transmigrators have been vaccinated against tetanus. Your wound is not deep, and the medic has already treated it. How could you have tetanus?!”

“You can’t be sure,” Xi Yazhou said weakly. “For the sake of the Party and the country, just give me a shot of antitoxin…”

He had said this several times in the past few days. Shi Niaoren shook his head helplessly. It seemed he wouldn’t leave without a shot. But he was unwilling to use the limited antitoxin on someone who was not sick—they couldn’t produce this antitoxin, and every shot used was one less.

“Alright, I give up,” he said. “You can be discharged after the shot.” He left the ward and called Zhang Ziyi over.

“Give him an injection of sodium chloride solution. Make it hurt! And tell him it’s the antitoxin.”

After dealing with this matter, Shi Niaoren returned to his director’s office and lit a cigarette. As a doctor, he didn’t need to smoke Holy Ship brand cigarettes. All the smokers in the health department smoked filtered cigarettes brought from the other time and space, gifts from grateful patients.

Everything is difficult at the beginning! Shi Niaoren thought, watching the smoke rings rise. The transmigrators were quite proud of their health department, and for good reason. In this time and space, the medical knowledge, skills, and effective drugs they possessed were enough to make every doctor in the health department a “miracle doctor.” But they were not omnipotent.

When the transmigrator who had fallen from the city wall due to overexcitement during the attack on the Gou family village died silently in the health team’s tent, Shi Niaoren and all the medical staff felt a strong sense of powerlessness for the first time. The man had suffered a head injury that might have been survivable in the other time and space, but here, they could only watch him die.

At the time, to avoid affecting morale, with the approval of the Executive Committee, the body of this obscure transmigrator was quietly buried in the wasteland behind the Bopu Health Center, waiting for a suitable opportunity to be re-interred in the martyrs’ cemetery. Fortunately, it was not long after they had landed, and personnel movements were frequent, so this person was soon forgotten.

“But it can’t always be like this,” Shi Niaoren said to himself. There were a thousand things to do.

Ever since the construction of the Bairen General Hospital was completed, Shi Niaoren had been considering establishing a preliminary medical system. They had the basic equipment and medicines, and although the doctors were few and somewhat specialized, they could make do. But they did not have a complete medical system, not even a rudimentary one.

After several meetings, the health department decided to first build up the Bairen General Hospital system as a model for all future medical institutions—just like the demonstration farm that Wu Nanhai had established.

This general hospital, through their efforts, now had five basic departments: surgery, internal medicine, infectious diseases, ENT, and traditional Chinese medicine. It had a pharmacy, a radiology room, and a laboratory. They had also taken over the health class from the military and political school system and established a nursing school, training a batch of nurses and army medics. Of course, in terms of skill, these people were not as good as the barefoot doctors trained in the 1970s, but it was better than nothing.

All the doctors were given the title of chief physician. Of course, there was no one more suitable among the transmigrators. However, these chief physicians at Bairen General Hospital were not as particular as those in large hospitals. They didn’t have a large team of graduate and undergraduate students to do the grunt work. They didn’t even have a qualified pharmacist. They had to do everything themselves, from taking X-rays and ultrasounds to dispensing medicine.

Qian Shuiting’s wife, Ai Beibei, was not originally a clinical doctor. She was actually engaged in pathological research in epidemiology. Now, she had to temporarily act as a gynecologist. Even modern women from the 21st century were often reluctant to be examined by a male gynecologist, let alone in the 17th century.

For the most common internal medicine and infectious diseases, due to the lack of specialized doctors, Shi Niaoren compiled the “Hainan Common Disease Treatment Guide.” He ranked the common diseases: intestinal diseases, respiratory diseases, malaria, skin bacterial infections, gynecological diseases… and then wrote down detailed treatment measures for each to improve treatment efficiency and avoid misdiagnosis.

The format of the medical records had to be written by the doctors themselves, so that the nurses and future medical interns could imitate them. The use of drugs was institutionalized: all special and unconventional drugs could not be used without his approval; the dosage of anesthetic drugs had to be kept close to the lower limit of the theoretical dose… Anesthesia was a critical specialty. Lack of skill could be fatal, but they were not very good at it here. Sigh, if something went wrong, there was no chance of rescue.

As for the laboratory, Shi Niaoren hoped to expand it—to be able to conduct medical tests, disease prevention, compile disease prevention and control manuals, and formulate reasonable disease control strategies. However, the disease prevention and control system required administrative power to support it, so it would be established after the organizational framework was decided.

Finally, there was the matter of putting the pharmaceutical factory into production, which was extremely urgent. The glass factory could now provide them with enough specialized equipment. The bacterial strains brought by He Ping’s wife were still in the laboratory. These things could not be stored for long and had to be put into production as soon as possible. They couldn’t rely on chemical pharmaceuticals for the time being…

“Director, everyone is here. Shall we begin?”