99 Please maintain this weakness (1/2)
When Zhang Fan arrived at the dermatology department for the sudden surgery call, he saw a middle-aged woman moaning in pain. Her forehead was covered in sweat, and it could be seen that she was forcefully withstanding her pain. A man was silently holding her hand. Zhang Fan presumed that he was probably her husband. Judging by their clothing, they weren't well off. In fact, the man's pants were even beginning to grow mold. However, it seemed that the husband and wife had a really good relationship with each other. The man seemed to be just as emotionally pained as the woman was in physical pain. Even Zhang Fan could tell.
Director Gulnazar was currently on the phone, arranging for an operating room. Doctor Qimig explained the situation to Zhang Fan. The man and woman were from another province, and had opened up a small restaurant in Chasu City. They would wake up at 4 am every morning and not go to sleep until 11 pm at night. Thus, fatigue kept accumulating, and today, the woman accidentally spilled boiling water on her foot.
She was in a panic, and immediately took off her shoe and sock, which caused her skin to peel off together with her clothes. Not only that, her husband applied soy sauce to her foot as a home remedy, which caused even more damage to her injury. The most pitiful part was that since they weren't locals, their medical insurance wouldn't cover their medical fees, as they counted as travelers. It was unknown whether their insurance would even cover it if they returned to their hometown province, and right now, the female patient's situation was that she needed skin grafting immediately. This would translate to a significant surgery fee. The female patient personally requested that surgery wouldn't be necessary, and that only basic treatment was all she wanted. However, her husband adamantly insisted on having a skin graft surgery performed. The wife didn't want to spend money, while the husband cared more about his wife's condition.
Zhang Fan went over to check the patient's condition. Her foot was burned on about 33% of its surface area, but not too deeply. However, since she had taken her sock off too quickly, there were several deep punctate wounds caused by the skin tearing off together with the sock.
[Author's note: allow me to blabber on a little about burn injuries. In normal situations where you accidentally scald or burn yourself, please don't immediately take off the clothing on the affected area, because your skin will have already started sticking to your clothing. If you take off your clothing, that will cause additional damage to your skin, which will be actually more severe than the original burn injury. The best normal response is to wash the burned area with large amounts of cold tap water, letting the water take away the heat from the burned area, which will prevent additional injury. You definitely mustn't apply soy sauce or toothpaste as home remedies suggest! Not only are those useless, it's very easy to cause an infection by using them!]
”The patient's injury definitely requires skin graft surgery. Please obtain the surgery fee as quickly as you can. Her surgery has been scheduled to take place in half an hour. Doctor Qimig, Doctor Zhang, please inform the patient's family of the details of the surgery and have them sign the paperwork,” Director Gulnazar said to the patient's family and the doctors once she finished her phone call.
”Okay!” Zhang Fan responded.
”I'll go gather money right now. How much more money do we still need?” the patient's husband asked.
”You should prepare another 15,000 yuan. You've already paid 5,000 yuan.”
”Doctor, could we please n-not do the surgery? I-it's too expensive.” The female patient gritted her teeth and bore the pain as she spoke with some stutter due to the pain.
”Relax, it'll all be fine. Don't worry about the money. As long as you recover, we can still make more money in the future. Doctors, I'll be counting on you. I'm going to make some phone calls and gather the money right now,” said the patient's husband.
”If you can't gather enough money, it's fine as long as you can gather about 8,000 or 9,000 yuan for now. Let's just do the surgery first, and you can slowly pay the rest later.” Director Gulnazar was tall and chubby, but she actually had an incredibly soft heart. Although she often emphasized to the other dermatologists that they had to obey the hospital's official regulations, she often violated the regulations herself. [Author's note: such doctors are really so precious. Please, I wish that there will be more kind doctors out there, although I also realize that it may be difficult to be like this.]
Half an hour later, the patient's husband came running back in while drenched in sweat. He showed Director Gulnazar a proof of payment from the hospital's finance department that he had paid another 10,000 yuan. ”Doctor, I gathered 10,000 yuan! That's enough for the surgery, the surgery!” Although he was quite worried about his wife, he was also excited.
Was 10,000 yuan a lot of money? For some, it wouldn't even cover the cost of a single meal, but for an ordinary Chinese family struggling to stay afloat from poverty, this would be no small amount. Maybe some people wouldn't understand such financial hardship. It would often be that a person could only watch but do nothing as their family member struggled in pain.
”Start writing the medical report. Penicillin will be used as the antibiotic. The patient will also receive glucose, salt water, and vitamin b6,” Director Gulnazar told Zhang Fan. These were all basically the cheapest medical supplies. Many Class A hospitals no longer even used penicillin for various reasons. Well, a 60-cent penicillin drug was injected into the burn injury patient's body.
The patient was brought to the operating room where she received anesthesia. After that was disinfection. Removing the soy sauce that had been applied to her foot would be necessary. Since the outer layer of skin had been burned off, the soy sauce had directly penetrated into the muscle layer.
”Sigh! Doctor Zhang, you absolutely need to be careful here and be thorough with the disinfecting. Otherwise, the skin graft will fail if there's any infection.”