My Medical Skills Give Me Experience Points

Chapter 1238: Chapter 488: Level 6 Separation Skill, All the Surgical Nurses Are Good-Looking

With his surgical experience, repairing this patient’s finger tendons is almost impossible; the only solution is to transplant a tendon.

Under normal circumstances, a human finger will have a superficial flexor tendon, a deep finger flexor tendon, and a finger extensor tendon.

With their contraction or relaxation, they assist the finger in completing flexion or extension movements.

The medical anatomical structure seems simple, but in cases like this where adhesions occur, the surgical difficulty can be terrifyingly high. It’s a delicate surgery, severely testing the skill and experience of the operating surgeon.

No matter how confident Zhou Can is, he still feels apprehensive when facing such a Level 2 surgery.

The patient, seeing Zhou Can’s hesitation, couldn’t help but plead with him to try and think of a way. Even if the treatment fails, he promised not to cause any trouble for the hospital.

At this moment, the patient’s father told Zhou Can that they had arrived early to see him and had been staying at a hotel for four days.

Because his appointments were so scarce, they couldn’t get one at all.

Finally, they spent two hundred yuan buying an appointment from a scalper.

There’s only one child in their family, and he’s already twenty-five years old. However, due to an accident, his right hand became disabled, severely impacting his job prospects, marriage, and life. This time, to treat his son, the patient’s father contracted seventeen acres of land and also found a logging job in their hometown’s forest farm.

He also told Zhou Can that no matter how hard or tiring it was, he wasn’t afraid.

As long as he could cure his son’s hand, he’d be willing to spend any amount of money.

Then he told Zhou Can how his son, after his hand was injured and disabled, continued to study hard, enduring pains unimaginable to ordinary people.

Ultimately, Zhou Can was moved by this father and son.

He consulted with Dr. Xu to devise a surgical plan.

The patient was admitted to the hospital yesterday and underwent all necessary examinations. Then the nurses and the attending doctor shaved the hair on the patient’s hands and feet and trimmed the nails, completing the preoperative preparations.

Regarding the source of the transplanted tendon, there are three choices: the first is allogeneic, which requires a donation from a deceased individual.

The procedure is complicated and has a certain waiting period.

However, generally speaking, tendons are not as rare and in-demand as organs like corneas, kidneys, or hearts, so the waiting period is usually not long. The cost is also not high.

However, allogeneic tendon transplantation carries a risk of rejection.

For a family in such financial difficulty, the cost is still not low.

The second option is artificial tendons.

With the continuous advancement of human technology, artificial tendons have been developed and are relatively mature technology-wise.

Again, the cost is not low, and there might be risks of rejection or inflammatory reactions.

All allogeneic transplants, whether artificial or taken from someone else’s body, carry the risk of rejection. Many people who received organ transplants need lifelong medication to counteract rejection.

It can be seen that the above two transplantation methods are not very suitable for this patient.

Moreover, this patient has already undergone two corrective surgeries, which will only make transplantation more difficult.

After discussing with Dr. Xu, and based on the patient’s overall situation, Zhou Can finally decided to perform an autologous transplantation using either the plantar tendon or the extensor digitorum longus tendon from the patient’s foot.

Performing this surgery carries significant risks.

If things go wrong, the patient’s right hand might not regain its function, and the toes could also lose their flexion and extension capabilities.

After extensive discussions with the family and the patient himself, and gaining their consent, today’s surgery was proceeded.

"You two watch closely. The incision usually chooses the zigzag cut on the palmar side of the finger as the most common."

While operating, Zhou Can taught the two some surgical techniques.

The zigzag cut on the side of the finger has the advantage of not leaving a scar on the tendon, making it easier to suture when the finger is in a flexed state.

Upon dissecting the patient’s finger, one can see the marks left by the previous doctor’s surgery.

That doctor’s surgical ability was not bad; the surgery was done very delicately.

However, the correction methods employed by that doctor were somewhat perplexing.

Zhou Can certainly wouldn’t comment on where the previous doctor’s surgery went wrong. Instead, he quickly completed the dissection of the finger and began extracting the tendon from the patient’s foot.

Currently, Yang Zhi and Pu Dingdong are still unable to assist Zhou Can in such high-difficulty surgical projects.

If the assistant doctor’s surgical ability were sufficient, they could even operate in sync with Zhou Can.

When Zhou Can completed the hand’s transplantation preparation, the assistant doctor happened to have also extracted the plantar tendon.

[Incision Skill Experience Points +1, Separation Skill Experience Points +1, completion of the challenging plantar tendon separation, reward Experience Points +100.]

Seeing the Separation Skill experience points sharply increase, Zhou Can was thrilled.

As for the Incision Skill, it has now been promoted to Director Level, and ascending to the next level requires a full one million Experience Points. If only 1 point can be earned at a time, it might take a lifetime to level up.

Even if occasionally rewarded with 10 points or 100 points, the promotion difficulty is still frighteningly high.

However, Zhou Can is confident that within five to ten years, he’ll elevate all the main surgical skills to Level 7.

Because as his surgical team continues to expand its members, some simpler surgeries will be handed over to other doctors in the team to perform. Meanwhile, he’ll continuously take on more challenging surgeries.

For example, the current hand tendon transplant surgery.

Don’t underestimate it as just a Level 2 surgery; its difficulty is extremely high. The precision required and the surgical techniques are in no way inferior to Level 4 major surgeries.

Relatively speaking, Level 2 surgeries have lower risk, and the surgical process isn’t as complex.

That’s all.

If one simply thinks Level 1 surgeries are especially simple, and any surgeon can perform them, while Level 4 surgeries are particularly difficult and only a Director Surgeon can operate, that would be too narrow-minded and superficial.