GDLR - Great Doctor Ling Ran

Chapter 4 - Tail Replantation

“You have already made the cuts, leave it there. You must listen to direction after this.” Kang Jiuliang set his eyes on a pile of rat tail pieces. He could not possibly make Ling Ran put all those pieces back together…

Well, that was not too accurate, since they were about to perform tail replantation right then.

“I shall do the demonstration.” Kang Jiuliang held a pair of medical forceps with his left hand while he picked up a needle holder with his right hand and said, “What we are using here is called a medical microscope instrument . Many students have most likely never touched this before. Its main feature is that it is small. For instance, the thickness of the suture thread that we are using right now is only one-tenth of a strand of human hair… By the way, student, how should I address you?”

“Ling Ran,” Ling Ran replied.

“Not much of a talker, eh?”

“Not much.”

“You’ll love talking in the days to come. Surgeons are all chatterboxes when they perform surgeries.” During the surgery, Kang Jiuliang had obviously turned into a completely different person than he was before the surgery.

Ling Ran responded with an “oh”.

Kang Jiuliang could not hold it in anymore and said, “Don’t you feel curious about why?”

“Because of boredom,” Ling Ran replied.

The interns giggled.

Kang Jiuliang was shocked for a moment. He asked, “Is the question I asked too boring?”

“It’s while the surgeons are operating that it gets too boring.”

“Indeed, performing a surgery takes a very long time. It’s true that it is quite boring. Normally, it would already be ten or twenty hours later when we finish a session for hand surgery. The others around you would probably want to talk even if you don’t feel like talking.” Kang Jiuliang no longer bothered himself with the underlying meaning in Ling Ran’s words. While he spoke, he started working with his hands, as if both actions would not affect the other and interfere with each other.

In the eyes of the interns, the rhythm of Kang Jiuliang’s hands as he worked and the speed he used while he spoke was completely different. As the saying went: practice makes perfect. Kang Jiuliang’s exceptional performance even while he spoke was probably what that idiom meant, because he could only do this after a lot of practice.

In the meantime, Ling Ran was also familiarizing himself with the details in Kang Jiuliang’s actions as he operated on the tail. After all, in the end, tail replantation for white rats was just a circulatory anastomosis.

It would require six to eight stitches on the small vascular section in order to stitch each of the severed blood vessels back together, thereby ensuring that blood would circulate smoothly, unobstructed, and without any leakages.

During the suturing process, the doctors should also be careful of not letting body cavities[1] and dead spaces[2] appear. In all honesty, these specifics and small concerns would be the things that define the skills of a surgeon.

For instance, a doctor of the Hand Surgery Department would require training for two to three years on tail replantation before he or she could reconnect the tail. But the condition of the white rat itself and the skills of the surgeon, which played an even more decisive factor, would determine whether the tail could function as normally as it had before, and whether there would be any pain or even complications after the surgery.

In simpler words, suturing was not easy, and completing the stitch perfectly was even harder.

Kang Jiuliang began to feel bored just talking by himself. He asked Ling Ran directly, “Do you recognize the suturing techniques I am using?”