Chapter 2564: Unable to Close

After a long time, he couldn’t recall what point of knowledge she was referring to. Fortunately, he was also a top student and considered smart, so he ran alongside Student Xie, asking, “What do you mean by what you said?”

As he asked, his face flushed with a bit of embarrassment, surely remembering the times he mocked Geng Lingfei, saying it was stupid for him to tail Student Xie, and now he was the fool.

“The surgery ended without closing the chest,” Xie Wanying, a humble person, wouldn’t act aloof and ignore her classmates, and would answer within her time limits.

At this moment, Dai Nanhui’s heart was suddenly touched.

The two of them ran to the adjacent ward.

On the white sheets lay Xiaohui, her little face pale, a tracheal tube connected to a ventilator at her small throat, and other machines and tubes connected to her, like a broken doll only sustained by machines, a scene that broke one’s heart.

Xie Wanying carefully lifted the blanket off the child, exposing her chest.

Looking at the transparent dressing on the child’s chest, Dai Nanhui finally recalled the relevant knowledge point: “The sternum isn’t closed.”

Delayed chest closure, as Student Xie mentioned, meant that the surgeons didn’t close the chest cavity as per standard procedure at the end of the surgery. The most crucial step in closing the chest cavity is closing the sternum.

Why didn’t the doctors close the sternum?

Most of the time, the doctors didn’t close it because they found they couldn’t close the chest cavity post-surgery.

This strange? Can’t the sternum be pulled together? You can pull it together hard, right?

To be precise, if the chest cavity were closed, the patient’s life could be at risk, so it can’t be closed. Specifically, closing the sternum might compress the heart, causing a cardiac crisis, or there could be uncontrollable bleeding from large heart vessels requiring open-chest gauze packing for hemostasis, preventing closure, or the pericardium might need drainage, making closure impossible.

Keeping the sternum incision open and the sternum spread has advantages? It enlarges the patient’s mediastinal volume, reducing pressure on the heart, especially the external pressure on the ventricular wall, while also increasing the end-diastolic volume of the heart, all of which help stabilize the patient’s circulation and breathing.

Delayed chest closure doesn’t mean the patient’s sternum won’t be closed; it’s just postponed until the life-threatening conditions pass.

Without closing the sternum, what about the exposed heart? Doctors might suture the outer skin. Given these patients’ potential critical rescuable conditions, many doctors now choose to cover the wound with a layer of sterilized transparent surgical film.

If you look closely, through the transparent film, you can see the unrepaired sternum held open with a sternal retractor.

What to do in this situation? Perform intracardiac massage and defibrillation? In Dai Nanhui’s mind, this thought was interrupted as he suddenly saw Xie Wanying moving in front of him and cried out worriedly, “What are you going to do?”

Xie Wanying locked her eyes on the ECG data on the monitor screen, and then, at the fastest speed, rushed to the rescue cart prepped by nurses in the corner of the ward, grabbed the sterile gloves from the top layer, tore off the outer packaging, and skillfully put on the gloves.

“Are you going to give her intracardiac massage?” Seeing her put on gloves as if she was going to perform such a procedure, Dai Nanhui was shocked and cried out.

There was no time to answer this time; what needed to be done might be a bit complex and difficult to explain in a short time. Xie Wanying said nothing, promptly, with gloves on, returned to the bedside, gently uncovered the film on the incision, and observed with her eyes.