Great Doctor Ling Ran

Two patients laboriously exercised their injured hands in the Emergency Department’s observation room.

Lu Wenbin put his hands inside the pockets of his unbuttoned, large, white coat and walked back and forth three times along the corridor. When he was about to walk along the corridor a fourth time, Wang Jia called him.

Even though Wang Jia had light makeup on and had cut her fringe, she still moved quickly, as if she was running away from fire. She yelled out Lu Wenbin’s entire name and said, “Lu Wenbin, go to the gym in the medical technology building if you want to exercise.”

“No one has the free time to exercise.” Lu Wenbin mumbled, then asked, “How’s the patient’s recovery going?”

“Which patient?”

“You know which patient I mean.”

Wang Jia chuckled and said, “How can the recovery of a patient go badly with Doctor Ling as the chief surgeon?”

“You have to pay special attention to the second patient today, Mister Tang. We’ll have to consider switching his medication if his edema doesn’t subside,” Lu Wenbin advised based on his meager knowledge. What he said could not even be considered medical advice.

Wang Jia still acknowledged what Lu Wenbin said. There were unreliable resident doctors ever year. Lu Wenbin was not the first one, and would not be the last one either.

The nurses’ opinions were more reliable when it came to the efficacy of medical advice. After all, they were the ones who approached and observed the patients on a daily basis. Therefore, they more or less had a clear idea on the current condition of the patients in their departments, and whether their conditions were normal.

Lu Wenbin felt guilty for saying these words, because it made him sound as if he was looking down on Wang Jia’s medical expertise. He took a few more steps and asked, “Is Doctor Ling on shift today?”

“Yeah.” Wang Jia could not hide the smile on her face.

“I’ll be on shift today too, then. The burden can be shared a little if there are two of us,” Lu Wenbin answered.

When he returned to the office, he also used the same excuse to apply for a change in shifts.

In front of the office table not far away, a resident doctor who looked so ordinary that it was hard for other people to remember his name, flashed a meaningful smile upon hearing what Lu Wenbin said. He was then instantly haunted by a vivid recollection.

Nighttime.

After he ate in the canteen with Wang Zhuangyong and Chen Wanhao, Ling Ran went for a walk and went back to the treatment room to await orders.

In a hospital of Yun Hua Hospital’s scale, there were still a lot of things that could be learned even in the Emergency Department’s treatment room. Ling Ran had debrided and sutured the wounds of a few hundred patients, and had more or less sutured wounds that were located on every part of the body from head to toe. If anything, he found it very interesting to encounter patients who suffered from tongue lacerations every now and then.

The huge difference in the patients’ nature of illnesses in larger or smaller hospitals led to the growing difference in quality between doctors from hospitals of different tiers.

If a thirty-something-year-old attending physician of an Emergency Department had stayed all along in a smaller hospital, his first reaction upon seeing a patient with a complicated condition would be to transfer that patient to another department. However, in a larger hospital’s Emergency Department, an ordinary person would need a lot of creativity and luck to sustain an injury that even attending physicians had not seen before.

After all, one should never overestimate one’s ability in bringing trouble to themselves, because there were a lot of people who were can create even greater troubles on themselves. It was just that there were very few such people celebrating their deeds because they rarely leave behind descendants.

Doctors from Emergency Departments were the witnesses of these historical moments.

Lu Wenbin went back and forth between the observation room and the treatment room.

Resident doctors were the actual leaders among the doctors present during night shifts. The attending physicians did not need to show up if there were no seriously injured patients. Of course, the appearance or non-appearance of seriously injured patients was completely dependant on the attending physicians’ luck. Sometimes, it was possible that inexperienced and ignorant resident doctors would find even a patient who accidentally swallowed a golf ball difficult to deal with.

After Lu Wenbin spent twenty minutes suturing a leg wound which had resulted from a broken beer bottle, he looked around out of habit. When he still did not see Ling Ran, he could not help but frown and asked a nurse who passed by, “Where did Doctor Ling go? I have not seen him since just now.”

The nurse tilted her head and thought for a moment before she gave a clear and definite answer, “Doctor Ling is probably reading a book in the on-call room.”

“He’s in the on-call room?” Lu Wenbin instinctively felt that something was not right. “How did you know that he’s reading a book in the on-call room?”

The young nurse flashed a cute smile, revealing her canines, and said, “A patient gave us some fruits earlier, and I gave some to Doctor Ling. He was earnestly reading a book.”

“Oh…” Lu Wenbin still found the atmosphere a little strange, but when he wanted to ask more about it, another patient came in with one of his hands wrapped around the other.

The young nurse quickly slid away. It would not be good for Lu Wenbin to leave, so he asked, “What happened?”

The patient opened the T-shirt the patient used to wrap his palm, and said with a grimace, “I picked up a broken beer bottle by the roadside and cut my palm while throwing it away.”

Lu Wenbin thought with a resident doctor’s basic, logical thinking, and asked, “Why are you twenty minutes late?”

“I couldn’t get a taxi… Huh? How did you know that I spent twenty minutes getting a taxi?” The patient thought. ‘Could it be that he’s a forensic doctor?’

Lu Wenbin took a debriding and suturing pack and put it beside his hand. He thought for a while and said, “We’ve had lots of patients who have the same injuries, so we discovered a trend to them.”

Twenty minutes passed, then another twenty. Lu Wenbin felt like a Whack-a-Mole player.

Every time he thought he was about to finish up at the treatment room, new patients would come in.

The peak period for the Emergency Department was at eleven o’clock. All five resident doctors from the five treatment groups had to work to clear all the patients that crowded the treatment room.

Lu Wenbin finally breathed a sigh of relief. He took the opportunity to go to the observation area to have a look at the two patients who received surgery performed using the M-Tang technique. He then returned to the on-call room.

The first thing he smelled upon opening the door was the scent of lavender.

Lu Wenbin sniffed the air with suspicion. He was quite sure that it was the scent of lavender. There was also no smell of sweat.

Before Lu Wenbin could give much thought to it, he saw Ling Ran, who leaned against the head of a bed, reading a book.

Ling Ran’s gaze was bright, and there was a ghost of a smile on the corners of his lips. His facial features were so distinct that they looked like they were carved out of marble.

“You’re back,” said Ling Ran, raising his chin politely and spoke as if he was talking to his roommates. “There are fruits over there.”

For some reason, he often received small gifts such as fruits and yogurt. He would share with his roommates the ones that were difficult for him to refuse or return.

Lu Wenbin’s gaze followed Ling Ran’s and fell on the bed stand. There were no signs of things like clothes, phone chargers, and toiletries that were often placed on them. Instead, there were plates and bowls of various sizes. Lu Wenbin counted, there was a grapefruit, four small slices of watermelon, a pomelo, a bunch of seedless and thin-skinned green grapes, eight lychees, four mangosteens, three jujubes, a glass with blueberries, a small bottle of hawthorn juice, three slices of papaya, a small bowl of cherries, a small packet of thin, stewed beef slices, a small box of green bean cakes, and an assorted platter consisting of slices of apples, strawberries and dragon fruits.

“Damn, our family doesn’t even prepare so much food when visiting graves.” Lu Wenbin got rather emotional.

“I bought a box of Milk Deluxe[1] and put it on the nurses’ station. You can eat them with ease since I’ve returned the favor.” Ever since he was young, Ling Ran understood that gifts must be reciprocated. However, he had always presented his gifts in return to an entire group, never to an individual alone, because it would cause him too much trouble. It would also be inconvenient because there were so many of them.

Lu Wenbin cursed again. He reached out his hand to grab a few lychees and said, “Why would I be shy? I was busy throughout the night.”

“Were there a lot of patients?”

“Of course. Didn’t the nurses call you when they sent the fruits over?” Lu Wenbin suddenly understood something. He spat and said, “What was I thinking? Of course the nurses wouldn’t call you to do work.”

Lu Wenbin was full of complaints. “They thought of you when they had fruits, but called me when there were patients. I would drop it if we were talking about another medical intern who doesn’t know how to do anything. But they didn’t call you even though you can suture so quickly…”

The moment he finished speaking, someone knocked on the door to the on-call room.

A young nurse yelled excitedly, “Doctor Ling, are you asleep yet? There’s a patient with a lacerated scrotum, just like what you asked for.”

Ling Ran had never been able to utilize the interrupted vertical mattress suturing technique he obtained before this. Now that he was finally encountering a patient he desired, he quickly said, “Alright, I’ll be there at once.”

Ling Ran rose, then put on his shoes and his large, white coat. As if remembering something, he then said to Lu Wenbin, “Look, they call me when there’s work to do, too.”

Lu Wenbin said in a trance, “I just wanted to say that for fun… Was I wrong?”

The young nurse looked sternly at Lu Wenbin, especially since he held those lychees in his hand, and said, “Why are you standing there? Go and help Doctor Ling.”

Translator’s note:

A popular milk beverage from Mengniu Dairy, a manufacturing and distribution company of dairy products in China. (Source: Wikipedia)