Chapter 1416: Anxious Patients

Chapter 1416: Chapter 1416: Anxious Patients

(Thanks to "Be Gentle and Talk to Me," Mo Yan, "15 Years of Reading," and Yuejie Zeyan for the monthly ticket encouragement)

"Qingqing, I’m rewarding you with a drumstick at noon."

When Liu Yiqing finished rounds and came down to the lobby to see patients, Xu Yino said happily.

"Nuonuo, are you out of your mind?" Liu Yiqing asked very solemnly.

"Out of my mind how? I made a mistake and Teacher Liu caught me. She told me to punish myself, so I decided my punishment is to reward you with a drumstick." Xu Yino said.

"Haha, I can go for that. I’ll call Manager Zhou in a bit and have him save me a big one." Liu Yiqing said, delighted.

"You’re such a foodie. Ah... the drumstick is small, losing face is big. I completely lost face today, and I don’t even know what was going through my head." Xu Yino said.

"What happened? Nothing much this morning, right? Teacher Liu did a spot check?" Liu Yiqing asked curiously.

"Don’t even bring it up. This morning they brought in a patient, we thought it was an MI. Later the exams showed it wasn’t, then Teacher Liu and the others all picked up on the patient’s full moon face and buffalo hump body habitus. I just vaguely felt something was off, that was all." Xu Yino said.

"Poor kid, it’s fine. Be good, just read more books from now on." Liu Yiqing said.

"Qingqing, if you saw a patient with that kind of body type, would you think of Cushing’s syndrome?" Xu Yino asked curiously.

"I don’t know either, I’d have to look carefully. See if there’s acne, then ask if he has any purple striae. But just walking past once, I probably wouldn’t catch it either."

"Anyway my principle now is, anyone who comes into our emergency center—doesn’t matter if they’re sick or not—I’ll assume they’re sick first. Then I’ll follow the symptoms we find and slowly work it up. If it really doesn’t fit, then there’s nothing more I can do."

"That’s a decent approach, it’s just that today’s patient really did throw me off a bit. Ah... I got careless, good thing she let me choose my own punishment." Xu Yino nodded.

Either way, this performance didn’t meet the standard. Work harder next time.

"Eh? Teacher Liu called over Teacher Zhang Xiao from neurosurgery, is it a pituitary tumor? I’m going to listen in." Xu Yino said.

With this nosy temperament of hers, Liu Yiqing was helpless. It’s exactly because of this that Teacher Liu keeps tormenting her—how does she never learn?

But really, it was also because Xu Yino cared a lot about this patient; this bit of excitement had to be joined.

"Dr. Zhang, take a look, this is the MRI we just did. Next it’s over to you guys, right?" Liu Banxia said after pulling up the images.

Zhang Xiao glanced at them and nodded. "Not bad, it’s not very large. The patient is already showing symptoms?"

"Already showing features of Cushing’s syndrome. We were just ruling out pituitary causes, and this popped up on the scan." Liu Banxia said.

"That’s actually pretty lucky, otherwise you’d have to keep working the whole way down—pretty much go through every endocrine system one by one. It really wears people out."

"So how is it, you can do this surgery too, right? I remember in neurosurgery it’s classified as level three? Transnasal pituitary tumor resection? That about right?"

Zhang Xiao shook his head with a wry smile. "This patient needs a trans-sphenoidal approach, we’ll have to get Director Xiao. But for Director Xiao, it’s not a particularly difficult surgery. About half an hour and that’s about it."

"Whoa, that fast?" Liu Banxia asked in surprise.

"Of course. Otherwise why would Director Xiao’s reputation be that big? If the patient’s condition is good, maybe he can take it out in twenty minutes. See, isn’t that simple? Don’t you want to come study it?" Zhang Xiao asked.

"Pfft..."

Listening in, Xu Yino couldn’t hold back, and when she saw the two of them look over, she bolted.

"What are you trying to do, why are you coaxing me into this? I’m not studying it, and I don’t have the headspace to study it." Liu Banxia said with a bitter smile.

"Conning you into studying neurosurgery procedures, that’s Director Xiao’s order. Work hard. That was the patient who just came in, right? I took a quick look when I came on this morning." Zhang Xiao asked.

"Yes, that’s the patient." Liu Banxia nodded.

"Doctor, they said you can see the results here." The patient’s wife came over and said.

"Let me introduce you, this is Dr. Zhang from our neurosurgery department. We’ve found a tumor in the patient’s pituitary, and at this point, the only way to remove it is surgery." Liu Banxia said.

"We’ll be inviting our hospital’s chief of neurosurgery, Director Xiao, to be the lead surgeon for this operation. Next, this Dr. Zhang will explain the details to you."

"Ah... so it really is a tumor. There’s no dodging it after all." The patient’s wife instantly seemed drained of energy.

"Don’t worry. For Director Xiao, this surgery isn’t difficult. Do you want to think about it first, or go ahead and get admitted?" Zhang Xiao asked.

"We’ve already finished the admission paperwork, I just don’t know what we’re supposed to do next." The patient’s wife asked.

"Don’t worry about that, I’ll adjust it in the system, transfer him from our general surgery ward over to neurosurgery. You don’t need to worry about the procedures, just go along to the ward first." Liu Banxia said.

The patient’s wife nodded. This was both the result she’d hoped to hear and the one she hadn’t wanted to hear.

She knew her husband was sick; there had to be a root cause, and it had to be found. But now it turns out to be a brain tumor, which was a bit beyond what she could handle.

Still, she had to face it. It’s a tumor, it has to be treated.

"Well? Any thoughts?" Liu Banxia looked over at Xu Yino, who had wandered back again.

"Well... how should I put it, even though we see this kind of situation a lot, I still feel a bit uncomfortable about it." Xu Yino said.

"Then just do your best. Has Wang Chao found a first assistant for his surgery tomorrow?" Liu Banxia asked.

"I don’t know, I haven’t asked." Xu Yino said.

"Wang Chao, come here." Liu Banxia called out.

"What?" Wang Chao, who walked over, was very wary.

"What’s with you? Why are you being so cautious? Who’s going to be your first assistant for the surgery tomorrow?" Liu Banxia asked.

"Ah, I forgot to think about that, I was just concentrating on the surgery itself. You’re not busy now, right? Can I talk it over with you?" Wang Chao asked.

Liu Banxia nodded with a smile. "Sure, let Xu Yino be your first assistant, she’s kind of free anyway."

"Okay okay, great, that’s great. I’m still not totally confident right now. You read the materials I sent you, right?" Wang Chao asked.

"Didn’t read them, I went home and just played with the kid. Let’s go to the office, I can look at them now, it’s still in time." Liu Banxia said casually.

Wang Chao was speechless, but there was nothing he could do.

If someone else said that, it’d be pure nonsense; when Liu Banxia said it? With his skills, it was just the plain truth.

"Xu Yino, Liu Yiqing, there’s a female patient here, you two take her on." Qi Wentai called out.

"Coming."

The two of them answered, put on masks and gloves, and walked over to the female patient.

The female patient wasn’t very old, just in her twenties, but her condition didn’t look too good right now. She seemed a bit worn out, and she also looked quite nervous.

"What’s going on with her?" Xu Yino asked the patient’s boyfriend who had come along.

"This morning after she got up she said she was feeling a bit unwell, so I took leave for her. She took some cold medicine and antibiotics, but she still wasn’t feeling well." the boyfriend said.

"You need to tell us exactly where she feels unwell. Dizziness, thirst, fever, coughing, that kind of symptoms." Liu Yiqing said.

"She doesn’t really seem to have much of a fever, maybe the medicine kicked in. Oh right, she was shivering for a bit. Then she became like this now; at the beginning she was actually in a pretty good mood, joking around with me, and now she’s all tense." the boyfriend said.

"Oh, and this morning when she got up she had diarrhea. That counts as a symptom too, right? That’s all I can think of; nothing else really."

"Alright, you go wait outside first, we’ll examine her and do a basic checkup. If you think of anything else, then come tell us." As she spoke, Xu Yino pulled the curtain closed.

"Her temperature’s a bit high, 38 degrees. Blood pressure’s normal, heart rate is a bit fast." After the initial exam, Xu Yino said.

"Heart and lung sounds also seem normal. Do you feel uncomfortable anywhere else? Tell us your most direct feeling, so we can have a direction for judgment."

"I don’t really know how to say it, I just feel unhappy right now. And when sounds are a bit loud, I feel kind of unwell too." the patient said.

"Your boyfriend isn’t bullying you, is he?" Liu Yiqing asked in a low voice.

Because the way the patient was nervous looked off, like she was overly anxious, and not just nervous because she was in a hospital.

"No, he’s not bullying me. I don’t know what’s going on either, but I feel a bit better now, maybe because I see you guys." the patient said.

That left Xu Yino and Liu Yiqing a bit stumped. The symptoms weren’t obvious; the only clear symptom was on the mental/emotional side.

As for her slightly elevated temperature, that could count as a symptom, but it could also be a stress-induced temperature rise. Another symptom was the diarrhea?

"What was your stool like this morning?" Xu Yino asked.

"I didn’t look at it, you can’t always be staring at your poop." the patient said.

"Then how did it feel to you?" Liu Yiqing followed up.

"It was just a little loose, and I felt a bit bloated in my belly, but now it doesn’t really feel like anything." the patient said.

"Alright then, we’ll do a blood test and a stool test to see if you’ve got enteritis. Sometimes enteritis can cause fever too." Xu Yino said.

"But what’s causing you to be this tense mentally, that’s hard to judge for now. Let’s observe first. Are you very afraid of hospitals?"

"Mm... kind of, I’m scared of blood draws and injections." the patient said.

"It’s okay, I’ll do the blood draw for you in a bit. What did you eat this morning?" Liu Yiqing asked.

"Rice porridge, fried hairtail, and Fuling Pickles, the chunk kind." the patient said.

Liu Yiqing chuckled. "None of those should be a problem. I’ll draw your blood first, then you can leave a stool sample. Right now we’re leaning toward enteritis, although your bowel sounds are normal at the moment."

The patient nodded. She was actually still a bit resistant to the blood draw; that might also be why she was so nervous.