Chapter 468: With All One's Might

For this purpose, twenty “blood cows” had been found. Their blood type matched Kim Go-sun’s, and they would be responsible for providing the plasma needed to maintain her blood volume until she reached Lingao. The plasma and saline solution were infused into her body through an IV line, personally inserted by Ning Jinghai. Medical staff carefully flushed this lifeline with precious 1% heparin to prevent clotting.

It could only be described as luck. A week later, when the ship arrived in Lingao, granulation tissue had begun to appear on Kim Go-sun’s wounds. As soon as she was ashore, she was immediately transported by a waiting team to the Bairen General Hospital.

The Bairen General Hospital had not been designed with a dedicated burn ward. When a boilermaker with severe scalds from an industrial accident became the first such patient to arrive alive, the hospital, for the sake of convenience, temporarily repurposed a then-unoccupied infectious disease ward, which had been designed with clean/dirty separation in mind. It was converted into an isolated burn unit, a lesson for the nascent medical community.

Subsequently, the number of burn patients grew, at one point reaching double digits. As a result, they had no choice but to expand the burn ward. Even setting aside the political propaganda value, the naturalized citizens working in the factories were a precious asset to the transmigrator nation, and their work-related injuries were fully covered by the Senate. For a time, Comrade Ma Qianzhu found the Ministry of Health’s bills, forwarded from the financial department, to be a great loss of face.

After Kim Go-sun was admitted, Ning Jinghai still felt the situation was far from optimistic. Throughout the journey, a cocktail of antibiotics, phages, and polymyxins—the full arsenal of drugs carried on the 901—had been locked in a stubborn tug-of-war with the high fevers and sepsis brought on by her infections. Now, in the second week after her arrival in Lingao, though the dead skin on her burns had nearly sloughed off, the sepsis repeatedly flared up. Lab tests indicated that Kim Go-sun might become the first naturalized citizen in this new world to develop antibiotic resistance.

At this point, her overall condition was relatively stable. After a consultation, the Elder doctors all agreed that while she had missed the window for early skin grafting, applying the technique now to cover the wounds would cut off the source of infection and save her life.

But on the question of how to proceed, the few Elder doctors at the Lingao General Hospital were divided. At the last consultation, Shi Niaoren had proposed that since Kim Go-sun’s hands were severely injured, especially her left, and were healing poorly, they were likely the source of the sepsis and the left hand should be amputated. Ning Jinghai, however, argued that while the left hand was seriously infected, it was only one part of her widespread wounds, and the infection was not so severe and was confined to the extremity. To blame the systemic sepsis entirely on the left hand was, in her view, without sufficient evidence.

The debate over this issue continued for days, and no clear treatment plan emerged. For the time being, they continued to treat the sepsis with targeted therapies. Fortunately, drug resistance was not yet widespread in this era’s microbial population, and they had a wide variety of bacterial strains and antibiotics to choose from. Furthermore, the Planning Committee had just issued a notice that several types of antibiotics brought from the old world were nearing their expiration dates and were no longer subject to the highest level of control, which gave them more options.

Shi Niaoren put on an isolation gown and entered the ward. Ning Jinghai and several other Elder doctors were already there.

Kim Go-sun lay on the bed, her arms wrapped in bandages. An IV line steadily dripped saline, glucose, and antibiotics into her veins. Her face was a full size smaller, sallow and thin. But her spirits seemed good.

“Chief… good…” Seeing Dr. Shi enter, Kim Go-sun tried to lift her head and greet him in her still-halting Mandarin.

“Don’t be so formal. Just call me Doctor.” Can’t your Mandarin be a little more standard? Director Shi thought. “How are you feeling today?” It was a routine question, but one that had to be asked.

Though Kim Go-sun’s pronunciation was poor, she understood simple conversation. “I… am… fine. Don’t worry,” she said, managing a smile.

Shi Niaoren nodded with a smile and held out his hand. A nurse immediately placed Kim Go-sun’s chart in it. He flipped through the recent entries: the patient’s sepsis had improved, a sign that the targeted treatment was effective.

“The situation is looking up.”

“Which is why I believe amputation is unnecessary,” Ning Jinghai said. “We should prepare for skin grafting immediately to close the wounds and cut off the source of infection.”

“Alright, we’ll proceed with your treatment plan,” Shi Niaoren said. He was preoccupied with other matters and no longer felt strongly about it. He understood Ning Jinghai’s thinking: preserving a whole hero was better for propaganda than saving a disabled one. It demonstrated the greatness and omnipotence of the Senate. As for himself, he simply wanted to save this poor girl’s life.

“For the skin graft,” Ning Jinghai said, “I plan to harvest a flap from the dorsal interosseous artery of her forearm and transplant it to the wound. The advantage is that it reduces the number of surgeries. In her current condition, I fear she cannot withstand too many operations.”

Shi Niaoren knew that the standard procedure was to use an abdominal skin flap, but that required multiple surgeries and often thinning of the flap. That was why Ning Jinghai was proposing this alternative.

“But doing it this way will leave an ugly scar on her forearm and will likely affect the function of her arm joints. She will need scar revision surgery and physical therapy. The recovery will be long, and it’s unlikely she’ll ever regain full function,” Shi Niaoren pointed out.

“These surgeries will have to be done sooner or later. Better to do them now. We can use this case to train a few physical therapists. And time is not an issue. A year, two years, we will see her recovered!” Ning Jinghai persisted. “I did a fellowship in hand and foot surgery at a higher-level hospital. I’ve done similar procedures. I can guide the naturalized citizen doctors.”

“Since you’re so decided, we’ll proceed with your plan,” Shi Niaoren said. He turned to Kim Go-sun and nodded. “Rest assured, we will cure you.”

“Thank you, Chief,” Kim Go-sun replied with another smile.

He had heard the stories of this girl, how she had never once cried out in pain or complained since arriving at the hospital. He held her in high esteem.

With the treatment plan decided, his involvement was no longer needed. Skin grafting was not a highly advanced technique; Dr. Shi had performed it himself back in his days as a surgeon in China. It was not difficult, and the cost was only a few hundred yuan. The real challenge in treating burns was combating infection. Kim Go-sun’s treatment, he thought, had only just begun.

He changed out of his isolation gown and returned to his office. Looking at the Elder fertility reports and the female slave medical examination reports on his desk, he felt a sudden urge to speak with Ai Beibei.

But at that moment, Ai Beibei was busy.

The Bairen General Hospital’s Third Outpatient Clinic—the “Mother and Child Center”—now occupied a newly built three-story building. It housed the hospital’s reproductive, obstetric, and neonatal departments. Of course, these departments existed mostly on paper. The only true doctor was Ai Beibei herself, and she was neither an obstetrician nor a pediatrician, and had little expertise in reproductive medicine. She was running on the fumes of what she had learned from textbooks in medical school and her time as an intern.

Their promotion of prenatal care and hospital births had been remarkably successful. Maternal and infant mortality rates had plummeted, and the policy had quickly spread throughout Lingao. Not only were the families of naturalized citizen workers adopting the practice, but ordinary naturalized citizen families were as well. Not that they had a choice: traditional midwives had been completely banned in Lingao. If a midwife did not attend a training course and formally join the health system as a certified midwife, she was out of a job. If she continued to practice privately, she would be arrested and sent to Fu Youdi for “re-education.”

The result of this happy state of affairs was a skyrocketing workload at the Mother and Child Center. The first and second floors were packed with pregnant women and their families. The delivery rooms were on the third floor. No one could say when that floor ever saw a moment of peace.

Now, Ai Beibei and two naturalized citizen midwives were scrubbing in. How annoying, she thought. Why do they always come in waves? It’s either none at all, or a whole batch at once. Sometimes, for hours, even days, the work was orderly, one delivery after another. Then suddenly, six women would go into labor at the same time, and chaos would ensue. It was one of those times now.

And all six were “maids.” Ai Beibei sighed silently. Poor women. By rights, the birth of an Elder’s child should be supervised by her personally, but she was completely overwhelmed. It wasn’t just her; even her personally trained midwives were not enough.

She had hoped that retraining the traditional midwives would fill some of the gap, but she was quickly disappointed. Lingao was a small place; there were only two “professional” midwives to speak of. The other women who helped with births knew nothing of even the most basic procedures. They could boil water and cut an umbilical cord, but in the face of a difficult birth, their only recourse was to burn incense and drink the ashes. They were completely untrainable. And so, she had been forced to pull from the already strained pool of nurses to train new midwives.