This miracle doctor just wants to be fired!

The surgery lasted until 2 a.m.

Angiography confirmed thrombotic occlusion in the proximal segment of the left anterior descending artery. The patient's circulatory status was worse than when admitted. After the guidewire was passed, some blood flow was restored, but the blood pressure did not rise significantly.

While treating the criminal's blood vessels, Zhou Cheng had his team reassess the volume and indications for mechanical circulatory support.

There were no dramatic complications during the surgery, and in the end she only completed the most necessary blood supply reconstruction.

There is new stenosis near the old stent in the right coronary artery, and the blood flow in the distal anterior descending artery has not yet returned to its optimal state.

However, the patient's blood pressure began to rise, and lactate levels did not increase further, so the benefits of continuing the procedure were no longer greater than the risks.

When Lin Feng arrived after receiving the call, the surgery had just ended.

He stood in the control room, looked at the final angiography, then glanced at the surgical record. "Should we leave the right coronary artery untreated?"

"Not going to be dealt with today."

"What about that location at the far end?"

"Observe first."

"In the past, you might have pursued it further."

Zhou Cheng took off his lead cap and wiped his forehead with a towel. "I didn't necessarily chase after them before."

Lin Feng chuckled, "Now, every time you stop, the people around you have to give you a second look."

"What are you looking at?"

"Are you thinking about those four cases of complications again?"

Zhou Cheng did not answer. Those few patients were still in his judgment, but they were not like an untouchable scar that made him refuse to take active measures from then on.

What truly remains is that before each step he consciously asks himself a question, more so than before.

Was this procedure performed because the patient requested it, or was it already part of the original plan?

……

Around 3 a.m., the patient was transferred to the intensive care unit.

When Zhou Cheng returned home, a small light was still on in the living room.

Lin Wei didn't sleep on the sofa; she only left a bowl of noodles covered with a thermal cover on the coffee table, with a sticky note next to it.

"Don't force yourself to eat the dough if it's soggy. There are wontons in the fridge. If you find even cooking wontons too much trouble, explain to yourself why you're going to work on an empty stomach tomorrow morning."

The handwriting ended with a tiny stethoscope, and below the stethoscope was a crooked electrocardiogram.

Zhou Cheng opened the insulation cover, and the dough had indeed clumped together.

He stood there for a while, then finally took the noodles into the kitchen, added water, and cooked them again.

I heard the sound of the bedroom door opening behind me.

Lin Wei came out wearing a coat, her hair a little messy, and leaned against the door looking at the noodles in the pot that had been cooked until they were no longer shaped.

"Didn't I write down asking you to cook wontons?"

"This is still edible."

"There's a significant difference between your standards for what's edible and your standards for data in academic papers."

"Waste is bad."

"I left you noodles at three in the morning, and you cooked them into porridge before eating them. It's a waste of my cooking skills."

Zhou Cheng turned off the stove and put the noodles into a bowl.

Lin Wei walked over, glanced down, and asked, "How is the patient?"

"Blood flow has been restored, and blood pressure has stabilized somewhat."

"And what about you?"

"What?"

"Weren't you submitting a paper today?"

"I voted."

Are you nervous?

"I'm not nervous."

Lin Wei looked up at him.

Zhou Cheng added, "Not needed for now."

"You really ruin the atmosphere with your words." Lin Wei sat down at the table and handed him a pair of chopsticks. "A normal person submitting an article to a top magazine would be excited for at least half an hour. But you, right after submitting the article, went to the emergency room and then came back to try and salvage a bowl of noodles."

"The paper has already been submitted, and I don't expect to get the results any faster."

"What if you refuse?"

"Revise it before submitting."

What if we win?

"Continue to revise according to the reviewers' comments."

Lin Wei watched him take a bite of the overcooked noodles, and finally couldn't help but laugh. "Have you noticed that for you, the solutions for both mild and mild cases are pretty much the same?"

"They're pretty much the same anyway."

"Then why do you still submit to top journals?"

Zhou Cheng put down his chopsticks, thought for a moment, and said, "Because this matter should be seen by more people."

Lin Wei stopped joking.

She knew Zhou Cheng wasn't referring to the thesis.

In the past, medical papers were more accustomed to summarizing how a technology succeeded, and few people were willing to talk about a failed promotion.

Few would admit in an article that the technology appears safe in the hands of the inventing team simply because the experts used a large number of undocumented implicit judgments, and that the so-called replicability is just an illusion if these judgments are not translated.

"Then it will be successful," Lin Wei said.

"Reviewers don't look at wishes."

"I'm not a reviewer either; I'm just here to say auspicious things."

Zhou Cheng smiled and nodded. "Thank you."

Lin Wei was about to say a few more words, but when she heard him thank her so formally, she was taken aback for a moment, and then reached out and pushed his bowl forward.

"Eat quickly. Then go to sleep. Don't go to the hospital at 7 a.m. tomorrow."

"There will be ward rounds at eight o'clock."

What time do you get up?

"6:30."

"What's the difference between going at seven o'clock and that?"

"You can have breakfast at home."

Lin Wei looked at him and stopped arguing.

She had long understood that it was almost impossible to get Zhou Cheng to stop working completely; the only thing she could really change was to leave him a few gaps between work where he could go home.

The two had agreed that they would not reply to students' messages after 11 p.m. unless it was an emergency.

At least one night a week should be free of meetings.

When my phone is on the dining table, I don't check work groups during meals unless I receive a direct call from the hospital.

These rules cannot guarantee that life will not be completely uninterrupted by the hospital, but they do ensure that life is no longer just an occasional gap between surgery and scientific research.

……

Forty-seven days after Zhou Cheng submitted his paper, the editorial department sent out the first round of decisions.

"Major overhaul!"

When the email arrived, Zhou Cheng was in the outpatient clinic, having seen more than forty patients that morning.

The last person in line was a 56-year-old woman who came in with a thick stack of test results, repeatedly saying that her chest would throb a few times every day.

I have already had coronary CTA, Holter monitoring, and echocardiography done at three hospitals.

All the results showed no serious abnormalities, but she was still worried that she might have cardiac arrest at any time.

The family members sat beside the patient, appearing more exhausted than the patient.

"She was afraid to sleep every night, and would check her pulse every few minutes. The Holter monitor showed premature ventricular contractions, so she was convinced that her heart was going to stop."

Zhou Cheng arranged all the examinations according to time and carefully inquired about the relationship between symptoms and activities, emotions, and sleep.

The patient speaks very quickly, often jumping to another question before finishing answering another.

"This doesn't mean the heart has stopped," Zhou Cheng explained. "The premature ventricular contractions (PVCs) occur early, followed by a relatively long interval, so you'll feel a missed one when you take the pulse."

"What if the heart stops beating during that interval?"

"Won't."

"But some people online say that premature ventricular contractions (PVCs) can lead to sudden death."

"The risk does increase when certain serious heart conditions are combined with specific arrhythmias, but your tests did not reveal this underlying condition."

"Will any checks be missed?"

No test can answer all the questions, but there is currently no evidence to support the claim that you have a high-risk heart condition.

The patient was still worried.

Instead of pressuring her with more test results, Zhou Cheng explained the number, morphology, and timing of premature beats on the Holter monitor item by item, and suggested that she undergo sleep and anxiety-related assessments.

The whole process took nearly twenty minutes, and there were no other patients outside the door.

The family members thanked him repeatedly as they left, but the patient still walked very slowly and did not keep checking his pulse as he had when he entered.

Zhou Cheng closed the consultation room door before picking up his phone; there were already more than twenty messages in the work group.

Zhao Sisi was the first to discover the editor's email, and then she downloaded the reviewers' comments.

The three reviewers raised a total of 47 questions, with the most critical concerns focusing on three points:

Is the definition of a halt decision derived from the ex-post outcome?

Did the trainees change their behavior after learning about the research objectives?

And with the decrease in serious complications, can we rule out the influence of a more conservative approach to case selection?

Lin Feng only replied with one sentence after seeing the email.

"Forty-seven points! The reviewers really didn't intend to give us a holiday!"

This is the latest chapter.