Chapter 470: The Infants

Now, with the public healthcare system and the strained relationship with Wudaokou, and with such a major and obvious case of medical malpractice, the Ministry of Health was probably in deep trouble.

It seemed a comprehensive inspection of this batch of expiring drugs was necessary to see if any expired products were mixed in. However, the drug procurement was diverse, and the channels were numerous, so the possibility of different batches of drugs being mixed together could not be ruled out.

He smoked half a cigar and scrubbed his hands again. The rescue was not over yet. But he decided to first check the expiration date of that vial of lidocaine hydrochloride.

After Ai Beibei came out of the operating room, she disinfected and changed her clothes again, and then went back to the delivery room. Four of the expectant mothers had already given birth smoothly, including the one with a narrow pelvis whom she thought might have a difficult delivery. They had all been wheeled out by now. One of them had her water broken artificially because it was not breaking on its own, and she was crying out in pain. Ai Beibei personally supervised the delivery and soon delivered a healthy baby girl, who weighed a full four kilograms—a record for the month.

It seemed that the children of the elder families were well-nourished. Ai Beibei thought that the children of the naturalized workers delivered by the obstetrics department were considered very good if they were over 3.5 kilograms. They were generally between 2.5 and 3 kilograms. According to the standards of the old world, a full-term baby of 2500 grams was on the light side, and here there were even full-term babies with developmental delays who weighed less than 2.5 kilograms.

Malnutrition among mothers and children was still widespread even among naturalized workers with stable incomes, not to mention the broader population—miscarriages and stillbirths due to malnutrition were common. It seemed that improving the people’s livelihood was a long and arduous task.

She carefully examined the baby and, after finding no problems, issued a birth certificate and an ankle tag. She then personally attached the non-reusable tag to the baby’s ankle—this was a matter of the elder’s bloodline and could not be taken lightly.

After doing all this, she changed her clothes, washed her hands, and walked to the obstetrics inpatient department.

The obstetrics inpatient department was separate from the main hospital’s inpatient department. It was well-lit. The high-class wards were at one end of the corridor, with a separate staircase and entrance: exclusively for female elders and the families of elders. They were divided into single and double rooms. In addition to the service personnel sent by the General Office, no family members were needed to accompany them—given the current shortage of professionally trained nurses, it was impossible to afford the luxury of using nurses for all accompaniment. It was not yet visiting hours, so it was very quiet inside, with only the occasional cry of a baby.

Ai Beibei saw two staff members from the General Office in the corridor. Although they were wearing masks, she recognized one of them as the General Office’s secretary, Li Yuanyuan. She was holding a folder: they were here to register the children of the elders.

According to the regulations of the General Office, every child of an elder had to be registered within 24 hours of birth. Ai Beibei knew that this registration was extremely precise and cumbersome. Not only did it include weight, height, hair color, and pupil color, but it also required taking palm prints and footprints for the archives. Needless to say, the little hands and feet of the babies born yesterday were definitely black with ink, and the female service staff from the General Office were probably busy cleaning them.

“How is it? All registered?”

“All done,” Li Yuanyuan said with a grin. “The little ones are so cute! I just want to pinch each and every one of them.”

“If they’re so cute, you should hurry up and have one yourself,” Ai Beibei said with a smile.

“I want to. You can have a few more too,” Li Yuanyuan said, not to be outdone. “It would be great to have a little brother or sister for Duoduo!”

Ai Beibei smiled. She really didn’t have the courage to have several more children in such primitive medical conditions. As a medical worker from the old world, she knew that even under the glorious light of the Senate, they were still missing too many links in the modern medical chain.

Even those that had been勉强补上 were full of flaws.

Ai Beibei looked at the ward round records and then inspected the wards again. She urged the nurses to encourage the new mothers to get out of bed and move around—she was scornful of the traditional Chinese practice of “sitting the month” and required that all mothers who had a natural delivery get up and move around every day, except for those who had a cesarean section or an episiotomy. And they had to take a bath.

Next, she went to the nursery. The corridor of the nursery was decorated with various shades of paint. This part of the building reflected the new trend of spaciousness and ample light when it was built. As Ai Beibei approached the nursery, she heard the cries of babies, as usual. Some were wailing at the top of their lungs, while others were crying in a feigned, intermittent manner. She always stopped here to look into the nursery, which was separated by three thick glass walls. It had become a habit. As usual, the small beds were almost all full. The obstetrics department was always so busy. She glanced at the neatly arranged rows of small beds.

Blue tags hung on the beds of the boys, and red tags on the beds of the girls. The children of the elders were not marked separately—no one was allowed into the nursery except for the dedicated nurses and doctors.

A nurse pushed a wicker cart past in the corridor, filled with swaddled babies, all waving their arms and kicking their legs and crying—these were the babies who had just come back from their bath in the bathroom.

“Hello, Dr. Ai.”

“Hello,” Ai Beibei responded politely, carefully observing the expression of each child. They were all very healthy, with rosy cheeks. Although they were on the small side, they looked full of vitality.

Across from the large nursery, there was a smaller one. It was quiet in there, with premature and underweight babies in individual incubators.

Babies born before twenty-eight weeks and those who were too light were difficult to save with the current medical conditions. The incubators they had brought with them could save the lives of premature babies born after twenty-eight weeks.

Anyone entering the premature nursery was required to do the same: wear a sterile gown and a mask. The nursery had air conditioning and humidity control. Family members could only look in from outside the large glass panel.

Ai Beibei pushed the door open and went in. There was another layer of glass separating the nurses’ station from the nursery. Ai Beibei nodded to the nurse on duty and looked at her newest patient through the glass: it was the child that Dean Shi had just delivered by a risky cesarean section. Although he was already thirty-seven weeks old and could be considered full-term, they decided to put him in an incubator for observation just to be safe.

“How’s the new little guy?”

“He’s crying very loudly. We’ve already given him some glucose water,” the nurse said. “Should we use artificial feeding?”

“Yes, artificial feeding,” Ai Beibei said. “He should be fine. Observe him for two days, and if there are no problems, transfer him to the regular nursery.”

She then wrote down the doctor’s orders in an orderly manner, as usual.

As she was leaving, a nurse came down the corridor with a person wearing a sterile isolation gown. From his clumsy movements and timid demeanor, she knew he must be a naturalized citizen. From his sturdy hands and feet and broad shoulders, he was probably a heavy manual laborer.

The nurse led him to the large glass window, and then the nurse inside pointed to one of the incubators in the row, so they could look inside.

“This little boy is your son.”

The man stared wide-eyed at the tiny baby sleeping in the glass box, as if he couldn’t believe that this wrinkled, reddish, little old man-like baby had anything to do with him.

“He… why is he sleeping in a glass box?” Lu Shouyong stammered. Don’t be fooled by how nimble he was with a hammer and tongs, or how he commanded his work team like an extension of his own limbs. But now, standing in this place that made him feel like he had nowhere to put his clean hands and feet, he suddenly felt like he couldn’t even speak properly.

Lu Shouyong had just gotten off work when he received the news that his wife was having a difficult labor. Lu Shouyong was instantly flustered. Not only was he flustered, but his father, Lu Youtian, was also in a panic. In Lingao, nothing was rare except for women, especially young women who could be married as wives. If it weren’t for the fact that Lu Shouyong was a key technical worker at the shipyard and his father was the foreman of the ironworking workshop, it would have been very difficult for Lu Shouyong to marry such a suitable and satisfactory wife. Although she was a bit older, she was at least a maiden, worked in the clothing factory, and had a good income.

In ancient society, a difficult labor often resulted in the death of both mother and child. For ordinary people, it was nothing short of a disaster.

“It’s alright, he was delivered by cesarean section. We put him in here just in case,” the nurse said. “He’s a very strong little boy.”

“What? Cesarean section!!!” Lu Shouyong’s face turned pale—he was not illiterate and roughly knew how to write those three words. To cut open a living person’s stomach and take out the child, could his wife still be alive? “My wife… she… how is she…” He was so anxious that his tongue was tied—a child without a mother, how could a big man like him raise him?

“Don’t worry,” the nurse comforted him. “The elder doctors are helping her. Your wife has had a narrow escape this time, but with the elder doctors here, you can rest assured!”

Ai Beibei returned to the operating room. The elder doctors were taking turns on duty, adjusting the patient’s internal environment, continuing to cool her head with an ice cap, maintaining her rectal temperature between 33-31°C, intermittently using diuretics, regularly checking her blood chemistry, maintaining her water-electrolyte and acid-base balance, and carrying out various targeted treatments. After such persistent and unremitting rescue efforts, and after more than ten hours of fighting without leaving the operating table, the convulsions gradually stopped, and she began to drip the first drop of urine, and the urine output gradually increased.

Everyone was ecstatic. Subsequently, the patient’s consciousness gradually recovered, she opened her eyes automatically, and reached the point where she could not tolerate the tracheal intubation and signaled to have it removed. After the tube was removed, the patient was able to understand simple commands, the brain resuscitation was satisfactory, and the patient’s life was saved.