After being separated from my family, I became a darling of the military region thanks to my medical

It's 6:30 in the morning.

Gao Haiping lay on the wooden bed with bricks supporting his legs, feeling as if his head was filled with lead. He tried to open his eyes, but his eyelids burned. His throat felt like it had swallowed a handful of shards of glass; it was dry and stinging, and even swallowing a sip of saliva made him wince.

"Achoo!" He turned his head and sneezed violently. The sneeze affected all the muscles in his body, and a tingling pain shot through the bones of his back.

Director Liu, who was sleeping on the opposite bed, quickly got out of bed, put on his coat, and came over. In the morning light streaming in from the window, he could see Gao Haiping's face, which was abnormally flushed. He reached out and touched Gao Haiping's forehead; his palm immediately felt a burning heat.

"Old Gao, you have a high fever." Director Liu turned and called Director Ma up as well. "You squatted in the windy corridor for more than three hours last night. This dilapidated house doesn't even have a brazier at night. How can you, at your age, withstand it? Hurry up and get dressed. I'll take you to the emergency room up ahead for a fever-reducing injection."

Director Ma, while putting on his sweater, chimed in, "Yes, Dean, this training expert building is no place for humans to live. We have to go find that skinflint Zhou Hai today and have him arrange for us to stay at the guesthouse. If you develop any health problems here, we won't be able to explain it to the hospital when we get back."

Gao Haiping propped himself up on the edge of the wooden bed. A wave of dizziness washed over him, and he gritted his teeth, closed his eyes, and took a dozen seconds to catch his breath. He brushed away the warm water cup that Director Liu offered him.

"No emergency room." Gao Haiping's voice was hoarse, like a broken gong. "The chlorpheniramine in the fever reducer will make me drowsy and confused. This morning, Dr. Ye has to approve the suturing plan we argued about last night, and this afternoon she has a complex surgical procedure for congenital heart disease complicated by pulmonary atresia. If my brain gets foggy from the injection and I miss a single detail in the operating room, this trip to Beicheng will have been a waste!"

"But your health..."

"You won't die!" Gao Haiping interrupted Director Ma firmly, reaching for the dusty gray military overcoat and wrapping it around himself, buttoning it all the way up to his chin. "Go to the canteen and buy two hot buns to tide you over, then head to Dr. Ye's temporary clinic early to queue. If you go late, you'll be squeezed into the back of the crowd, and all the chances to ask questions will be taken by those doctors from the south."

He pulled the black hardcover notebook from under his pillow, leaned on his walking stick, and walked unsteadily but with firm steps out of the cold, damp dormitory. Director Liu and Director Ma exchanged a glance, could only sigh helplessly, and quickly followed him.

At eight o'clock in the morning, the lobby on the first floor of the main hospital's outpatient building was still bustling with people. But at the end of a corridor on one side of the lobby, outside the door of a large office with a sign that read "Surgical Expert Consultation Room," it was eerily quiet.

Along the long corridor, a row of elderly men and middle-aged people in white coats stood at the foot of the wall. These chief physicians, who were sought after as lifelines by patients' families in their respective provinces, were now quietly queuing, each holding a medical record folder or a piece of paper with sketches, not daring to even breathe loudly.

The office door was open. Ye Zhen sat behind the large desk, wearing a crisp white coat, her long hair neatly tied in a bun at the back of her head. In front of her were two mountains of medical records, each half a foot high, filled with records of difficult and critical illnesses from all over the country sent from the three temporary triage rooms outside.

"Next." Ye Zhen didn't even look up, her red and blue pencils moving rapidly across the medical record book.

Liu Jianmin from Shanghai, who was at the front of the line, strode in and placed a medical record on the table. He didn't ask any questions about the record, but instead spread out the suture sketches he had drawn on the corridor floor the night before.

"Dr. Ye, we spent the whole night working out the glutaraldehyde pericardial suture technique we showed on the blackboard yesterday. Regarding the tension distribution in the right ventricular outflow tract, there are currently two main opinions. One is interrupted suture with a widened spacer, and the other is my straight suture with double-layer decompression. Which approach do you think has the lowest risk of tearing in practice?"

Ye Zhen stopped writing. She raised her eyelids, her gaze sweeping over the somewhat messy sketches, skipping over Liu Jianmin's straight-line plan, and landing on the "Y"-shaped cut diagram marked with the word "High" next to it.

Gao Haiping stood outside the door, craning his neck to look inside through several heads, so nervous he held his breath. Although he was dizzy from the fever, his eyes were fixed on Ye Zhen's expression.

"Who came up with this 'Y'-shaped base design?" Ye Zhen asked, pointing to the picture.

Ignoring the rules of queuing, Gao Haiping pushed past the people in front of him, leaning on his cane, and strode into the office, standing in front of the desk. "It's me. Considering that the bottom of the outflow tract receives the greatest impact from the blood spurting, using interrupted mattress sutures as a base can disperse the tension."

Ye Zhen looked at the old expert in front of her, whose face was flushed and whose forehead was covered in cold sweat. A faint hint of approval flashed in her cool eyes, but she quickly looked away, picked up a red pencil, and drew a big X at the bottom of the "Y" shape.

Gao Haiping's face paled, and his mind went blank. Was he wrong?

"The idea is clever, but the materials science isn't fully grasped." Ye Zhen pushed the blueprints back in front of the two of them, her voice calm and professional, without any emotional fluctuation. "Your calculations are all based on using domestically produced silk thread. The silk thread itself has high cutting power, and when combined with the pericardium, it can indeed tear."

She picked up a pen and wrote a line of small print in the blank space. "For this surgery, silk sutures cannot be used, and interrupted sutures are even less acceptable. 5-0 polypropylene sliding sutures with round needles must be used. These sutures have an extremely smooth surface and no tissue dragging sensation. The incision is made in a straight line, using only one suture, and a continuous 'parachute-like' suture is made starting from the bottom. Tighten the suture every three stitches. The tension of the polypropylene sliding suture will be evenly distributed across the entire suture surface, resulting in a perfectly sealed incision with no uneven tearing points."

Parachute-type continuous stitching? Polypropylene sliding thread?

These two unfamiliar terms stunned all the experts present. In domestic surgical procedures, catgut and ordinary silk sutures are the mainstream; slippery sutures, with their special physical properties, are practically unheard of even at the grassroots level. And that suturing technique completely overturned everyone's understanding of safety reinforcement. Directly using continuous sutures to distribute the overall tension is far more mechanically advanced than intermittent sutures with several knots!

Looking at the line of text on the paper, Gao Haiping mentally constructed the resistance data of the sliding wire moving through the tissue, and suddenly it all became clear. It turned out that there was no need for complicated incisions and cumbersome pads; simply changing a tool and a technique could resolve a fatal problem.

"Wonderful... wonderful..." Gao Haiping murmured to himself. He was so excited that he wanted to ask a few more details, but as soon as he opened his mouth, an itch rushed straight to his throat.

"Cough cough cough cough!" He covered his mouth and coughed violently, his back bent over from coughing, and he weakly held onto the edge of the desk, panting heavily.

Ye Zhen put down her pen, looked up, and lingered for two seconds on the old man's flushed cheeks and heavy breathing.

A few seconds later, Ye Zhen pulled out an internal prescription form from the main hospital from the drawer and quickly wrote down a few medicines.

Ye Zhen handed the prescription to Director Ma next to her, "Go to the pharmacy and get two doses of traditional Chinese medicine to reduce fever and induce sweating, and also get a box of Cefazolin for inflammation. After taking the medicine, lie down in bed and sweat it out. You don't need to go to the surgery this afternoon; you won't be able to stand up even if you go."

Gao Haiping panicked, snatched the prescription, and slammed it on the table. "No way! Dr. Ye, this afternoon's pulmonary atresia case is a masterpiece. I'll see it even if I burn myself to death on that wooden bench!"

Ye Zhen leaned back in her chair, crossed her arms, and looked at the stubborn old man. "If you have a fever and faint in the operating room, not only will you be making a mess on the floor, but the bacteria you carry will also disrupt the laminar flow sterile environment of the operating room."

Gao Haiping was speechless after hearing that. Ye Zhen used the most professional reason to block his path of shirking responsibility.

Ye Zhen glanced at the regional directors shivering outside the door, her brows furrowing slightly. "Why didn't you sleep in your dorms last night? Where did you all go to catch a chill? You've all turned into patients with typhoid fever. Who's going to write the triage records for the rest of the time?"

Liu Jianmin gave a wry smile. "Dr. Ye, it's not that we were wandering around. That training expert building... it really doesn't block the wind. Half of the window glass is broken, and it's all covered with newspaper. A dozen or so of us old guys were reviewing your anatomical diagrams from the day in the corridor at night, and with this north wind blowing, it was bone-chilling. Old Gao squatted in the wind and discussed with us for three hours before he collapsed."

Ye Zhen tapped her pen tip lightly twice on the table.

"Understood." Ye Zhen picked up her pen again and pulled out the next medical record. "The surgery will proceed as scheduled this afternoon. Director Ma, take your hospital director back for administration of the medication."

Gao Haiping wanted to argue, but Director Ma and Director Liu dragged him out of the office. Although he failed to secure the opportunity to observe in the afternoon, he clutched the letter with the words "parachute continuous suture" written on it tightly in his hand, as if he were holding a priceless martial arts manual.