Dealing with an unreasonable, trouble-making auntie is troublesome, and calming one down requires a special skill.
"Auntie, you want a scan?" Head Nurse Hu Jing, who had accompanied Sun Li'en to deliver the patient, stepped inconspicuously between the two, smiling as she looked at the auntie whose face clearly said, "I'm determined to get an advantage."
"You just cut in line!" The auntie didn't answer the question, simply sticking to her conviction that she had caught the doctors in the wrong. "There are so many people here, and you delayed each of us by over ten minutes. Added all together, that's several days of life wasted!"
"You mentioned you needed a scan. What exactly is bothering you?" The head nurse asked with a smile. "If it's not a severe discomfort, it's best not to get a CT scan casually. CT radiation is very strong. One full-body scan is equivalent to over two hundred chest X-rays."
What do middle-aged and elderly people fear the most? Besides missing out on cheap vegetables and bus seats, it's probably the unseen, unfelt radiation that seems certain to cause cancer.
The auntie's face instantly turned pale. The electromagnetic shielding door outside the CT room seemed to transform into a demon's maw wantonly emitting nuclear radiation. She took several steps back, then feigned composure. "Ah, I just remembered I left the TV on the stove with the gas on at home, I... I need to go."
"Sis, is it okay to say that?" Sun Li'en was saved, but he was a bit worried about the head nurse's approach. "What if the old lady really comes back and accuses you of scaring her, causing her to not get a CT scan, and then she has some kind of medical emergency?"
The head nurse sighed. "Everything I just said is factual. Refusing the CT scan was her own decision. What does that have to do with us?"
"Including the 'over two hundred chest X-rays' part?"
"For a full-body tomography scan, it is indeed equivalent to about two hundred and fifty chest X-rays." The head nurse chuckled. "I didn't lie."
Now thatwas wisdom. Sun Li'en was deeply impressed by the head nurse's cleverness and was racking his brains for words to praise her when she interrupted his train of thought. "Stop thinking about it. Go to the Imaging Department and ask them to come take a portable X-ray. The patient's condition isn't suitable for moving. We can have them do an X-ray while the CT scan is being processed."
Having received her help, Sun Li'en naturally had no reason to refuse. It was just a short errand, maybe pushing some equipment along the way. Without giving it much thought, he agreed.
Little did he know that when it was his turn to act, he would be thoroughly tormented by his own "mental illness." The outpatient results waiting area for the Imaging Department, for the convenience of patients, was deliberately set up in the corridor. This resulted in the lobby leading to the Imaging Department being almost packed with all sorts of people. The "status windows" that had been plaguing Sun Li'en since morning seized the opportunity to make their presence overwhelmingly known. Dense clusters of status windows labeled with countless names not only blocked Sun Li'en's view of the path but also gave him a faint headache.
If only these things could be turned off. Thinking this, he tried to edge closer to the wall. If he could use the wall as a guide, his field of vision wouldn't be such a problem.
However, the moment his arm brushed against the wall, Sun Li'en suddenly felt the pain in his head vanish. He instinctively glanced at the patients waiting for their imaging results. The status windows that had filled his entire field of vision were completely gone.
Sun Li'en almost jumped for joy. The symptom had disappeared!
Although his inner jubilation was overflowing, even showing on his face as an unconscious smile, Sun Li'en quickly snapped back to reality—now was not the time to celebrate.
He practically jogged to the Imaging Department, explained the request for a portable X-ray to the doctor on duty, and then pushed a cart back to the CT room with them.
Lin Lan, whose agitation had been subdued by sedatives, lay on the examination table, drifting in and out of a dazed, semi-conscious state. Her CT scan had just finished. Xu Yourong, the attending neurosurgeon invited by Deputy Director Liu for consultation, was frowning deeply. Her face was almost pressed against the display screen as she studied the images and data, her brow tightly knit.
The CT results were not optimistic. Although Lin Lan's head had suffered no external injuries like fractures from the car crash impact, it had still caused a cerebral hemorrhage. A hematoma roughly three by three centimeters in size had appeared in the subarachnoid space of her brain and was beginning to compress the right hemisphere.
The hippocampal region of the temporal lobe primarily controls human hearing, emotions, and memory. Compression from the hematoma could lead to various symptoms like memory impairment, hearing loss, and emotional disorders. For the well-experienced neurosurgeons, this was also a very serious case.
"The surgical difficulty is relatively high." The beautiful female neurosurgeon, Xu Yourong, pointed at the screen with a frown. "Surgery in the hippocampal region itself is prone to causing sequelae. If we perform a craniotomy, her circulatory system in its current state probably can't withstand two major surgeries."
Director Liu was also troubled looking at the scans. "With a hematoma this large, can it be absorbed naturally?"
"Unlikely." Xu Yourong shook her head. "After Orthopedics performs the skin flap suture for the degloving injury, to ensure circulation and prevent thrombosis, they'll definitely need to control coagulation. Controlling coagulation carries a bleeding risk. During our procedure, we'd have to remove a section of her skull for decompression. Further bleeding could easily trigger cerebral herniation. In her current state, once cerebral herniation occurs, there's a ninety percent chance she won't make it." She also grew worried. "But her current bleeding is already around 40 milliliters. If she has another cerebral hemorrhage, there's still the danger of herniation."
"If we leave it, she will definitely die. If we operate, she has a ninety percent chance of dying. We're a group of doctors. We can't just watch such a young girl wait for death." Director Liu sighed and made a decision. "I'll contact Orthopedics and Hematology for a joint consultation. If possible, you can do a relay. After you handle the cerebral hematoma, let them perform the lower limb surgery. If they use heparin and signs of bleeding reappear, then prepare for amputation. In short, save the life first, then treat the disease."
Inside the CT room, Director Liu made a risky decision to save Lin Lan's life and her future quality of life. Meanwhile, beside the CT machine, the imaging doctor was puzzling over the X-ray film in his hand.
"The angle looks fine." The imaging doctor held the X-ray film up to the light on the machine, looking it over repeatedly. "What's going on here?"
Sun Li'en, steadying the machine, heard the imaging doctor's muttering and asked curiously, "Brother Luo, is there a problem?"
"The image is wrong." The imaging doctor called Brother Luo shook the film in his hand. "This is a male pelvis image. Look at this pelvic inlet, definitely male... this is really bizarre."
"Could the film have been double-exposed?" Sun Li'en thought of the artistic photos he'd seen before, where multiple exposures on the same negative could produce strange effects.
"Impossible." Brother Luo shook his head so hard it seemed it might fall off. "I'm not stupid. The film was freshly opened, and there was nothing else in the imaging area."
Sun Li'en scratched his head. With the knowledge base of a resident-in-training, he really couldn't analyze the cause. "Should we take another one and try?"
Brother Luo sighed, took another film from the packaging, and carefully placed it under Lin Lan. "This sheet is wasted anyway."
The second X-ray image turned out exactly the same as the first.
Sun Li'en examined it carefully and suddenly remembered the content of the description he had seen earlier. He swallowed hard, saying with difficulty, "So... she should actually be a young man, right?"