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 ¹ . 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.”

“Alright!” Zhang Fan replied affirmatively.

Meanwhile, Shao Hua had just finished dinner, and was walking around outside by herself. Before, she didn’t have much understanding of the profession of doctor. Ever since Zhang Fan entered her life, she now understood it more. Zhang Fan’s vomit and his disgusting experience that also made her vomit, the fact that he would need to go to another city in the middle of the night to perform surgery, or that he would suddenly be called away during the middle of a meal, none of this would be easy.

The skin graft surgery began. First would be choosing a location to graft skin from. The most common would be to choose skin from the inner thigh. The skin there would be thick enough and possess good malleability and abundant blood vessels. Thus, this location was considered one of the best to graft skin from.

Most people probably had never seen a dermatome before in their life. Perhaps they wouldn’t even know the word dermatome, which referred to a special surgical knife used for skin graft surgery. A dermatome would have a special shape suitable for producing thin slices of skin from a donor area. For the patient’s type of medium-area burn injury, it would be best to use whole skin grafting. Fractional skin grafting would be unlikely to succeed. Fractional skin grafting meant cutting off small parts of skin to individually place on the injured location.

Zhang Fan was quite swift and well-practiced with his movements. Director Gulnazar was the primary surgeon for this surgery, with Doctor Qimig as her primary surgical assistant and Zhang Fan as the secondary surgical assistant. However, Zhang Fan gradually took over the responsibilities of the primary surgical assistant instead as the operation went on. His assistance helped Director Gulnazar even more than Doctor Qimig’s did, despite the latter being a veteran dermatologist.

“Doctor Zhang, when are you going to decide on choosing a department?” Director Gulnazar asked when the surgery was almost over.

This was her first time working on a surgery together with Zhang Fan, but she was highly satisfied with his skills. His movements were excellently standardized and well-practiced. She figured that he had worked on many skin graft surgeries before.

“I don’t know yet. Sigh! There’s still many more departments that I need to be rotated through.”

“How about I ask Superintendent Ouyang to keep you in the dermatology department? All of us doctors in this department are getting old. No youngsters have joined our department for many years already. If you join this department, you’ll easily become the department director after all of us retire in a few years.”

“Haha, future Director Zhang, you’ll have to treat us to a meal then!” Doctor Qimig joked around. He had a teasing tone, not a jealous one. The dermatology department really did have a friendly, familial atmosphere.

Director Gulnazar had been especially satisfied with Zhang Fan’s attitude in how he gritted his teeth and completed the checkup for the patient with genital warts the other day. Such tolerance would be necessary in order to treat every patient properly with kindness. Although skills could be developed, attitude and mindset would be truly difficult to change.

“Haha.” Zhang Fan chuckled foolishly without saying anything else. To be quite honest, he felt that the dermatology department was too small and couldn’t satisfy him. However, it would be rude to directly refuse Director Gulnazar, and he didn’t want to lie, so all he could do was act silly.

The skin graft surgery was completed quite successfully. However, this surgery was only the first step in treatment for a burn injury. Medicine changing and postoperative care would also be vital. If anything at all went wrong, and the skin graft became infected, the graft would likely end in failure. The patient’s diet was also critically important as there would be severe protein loss after a burn injury.

The patient’s husband had constantly been staring at the operating room’s door, without sitting down for a single moment. The surgery had lasted for several hours, yet he stood there for all this time. He and his wife had traveled thousands of kilometers to arrive here, working hard and getting through difficulties together. Their financial situation had slowly improved here, and things were looking up for them. Yet, his wife suffered such a painful accident at such a time.

He felt so much distress, and really wanted to take her place. The more he thought about it, the more he regretted things. Obviously, it would be quite fatiguing for both of them to maintain a work schedule like they did, from 4 am to 11 pm. But, regret would be useless now. He could only hope that the doctors would do their best on the surgery for his wife. He prayed to all the Buddhas that he knew. He felt so helpless. All he could do now was pray.

After the surgery ended, Doctor Qimig told the husband and wife what they needed to watch out for during the postoperative care. Zhang Fan witnessed the patient’s husband’s hands trembling as the latter brought out a red packet, which made Zhang Fan really want to burst into tears. This scene really reminded him of when his own father had been in the hospital! He felt that his mother had probably been just like this patient’s husband ¹ !

Was Zhang Fan weak? Not at all! Hopefully he would always be able to maintain this weakness!