Chapter 218: Instant fame
Translator: imperfectluck Editor: Kurisu
It seemed like things had a good outcome, since both patients were fine in the end.
However, that wasn’t the case at all! The hospital administration department wouldn’t let things go that easily. Although nobody had died, which meant that no report needed to be made to the Bureau of Health, this still counted as a medical incident. The administration wouldn’t care about the specific circumstances. The administration would only punish you severely so that you wouldn’t easily forget. Was the hospital or the hospital administration department being too severe? Not at all, because this was about human lives. No mistake would be allowed, whether it be major or minor!
In this flu epidemic, the majority of patients had virus-type colds. Only a small minority had germ-type colds. While antibiotics could be used for the germ-type colds, colds caused by the flu virus were far scarier.
This was due to the fact that there was no highly effective medicine against the flu virus. People would have to rely on their own immune system to resist the flu. Foreign antiviral medicine would only be most effective during the first two days that someone got infected with the flu. However, most people would still be at home during the first two days, not having hospitalized themselves yet. Those who came to the hospital were almost always on their third or fourth day of the flu already. Besides, how were ordinary people supposed to know how to fight against the flu?
As the flu epidemic went on, Director Yang Guangwei of Chasu City Hospital’s traditional Chinese medicine department came to talk to Superintendent Ouyang. Here in northwestern China, medicine wasn’t as developed even in modern days. Additionally, there was less population here, so the northwest had produced fewer famous doctors. With the past several decades of no progress, the Chinese medicine department was incredibly marginalized in Chasu City Hospital.
There were only two doctors in the traditional Chinese medicine department under the director. These two doctors would take turns providing clinical treatment. As for the old director, he had actually been rehired after retirement. Why was such an ancient medicine branch unable to produce enough doctors to fill a normal department? Who knows?
Yang Guangwei was from a family of traditional Chinese medicine doctors, which was quite rare in the northwest. He had been studying tuberculosis for his whole life. He was the first in China to mention that tuberculosis and diabetes were connected. But, due to lacking conditions, that was all he could do. He didn’t have the conditions necessary to perform higher-level research. Although he was getting quite old now, he was still continuously learning, and paid close attention to the field of Chinese medicine.
He was quite worried about the flu epidemic this time as he was indeed a caring doctor. He worried more about this matter than most youngsters would. He was easily able to talk to leaders as well as deal with civilian questions.
“Superintendent, take a look at this report.” Yang Guangwei brought a one-year-old magazine to Superintendent Ouyang. Although Superintendent Ouyang was incredibly busy due to the flu epidemic, she had to be polite to Director Yang as the latter had worked hard at the hospital for his entire life. She had to respect that.
“Director Yang, you should pay attention to your health as well. This flu epidemic is far too vicious. The hospital is basically like a plague area now,” Superintendent Ouyang commented while preparing to only pretend to look at the magazine. That was because Director Yang was too much of an academic who could blabber on endlessly.
However, Superintendent Ouyang was instantly drawn to the magazine’s report when she took a look. Very few people would even read a magazine about Chinese medicine combined with the effects of western medicine, but Superintendent Ouyang saw a report on evidence-based medicine that China had done for H1N1.
Back in 2009, H1N1 had been running rampant. The largest hospitals in China had done some simple tests on various antiviral medicines. Although the experimental data wasn’t enough to be absolutely certain, 1000 times wasn’t a low number at all.
According to the report, lianhua qingwen capsules were far more effective against influenza than oseltamivir. Without regards to anything else, just based on price alone, oseltamivir was nine times more expensive than lianhua qingwen. Not only that, oseltamivir was also really short on supply.
Superintendent Ouyang put down the report, and asked Director Yang, “Shall we try it?”
“Yes, we should. Let’s add lianhua qingwen as a medicine in addition to the basic treatment. We can’t just continue with the basic treatment. We must be responsible towards our patients.” Director Yang began to give a lecture. He really loved to blabber as he was getting old.
Superintendent Ouyang hurriedly stopped him. “Director Yang, let’s talk about such things later. Is your body still doing alright?”
“Yes! No problem at all. Please give me any mission that you like.” Director Yang stood up straight even though he was getting slightly hunchbacked already.
“Due to the high number of patients and especially infectious nature of this flu epidemic, as you have ample amounts of Chinese medicine knowledge, I would like to ask you to help gather data on the patients’ recovery with lianhua qingwen if we start to use it on a large scale.”
“Not a problem! I’ll definitely do my best!”
“The prerequisite is that you must protect yourself. You’re someone irreplaceable at our hospital.”
“Not worries. I’ve been a doctor for all my life. This tiny flu won’t be able to defeat me.”
Treatment and medicine would always go together. An excellent doctor would also have to be an excellent pharmacist. However, due to modern categorization, doctors now only knew some basics about medicine. Director Yang was more old-school, and he was an expert on both treatment and medicine.
Chasu City Hospital began to use lianhua qingwen on a large-scale basis to treat the flu. Director Yang led younger doctors in constantly gathering data on the patients’ recovery.
Gathering data was a very complex process. It wasn’t as simple as seeing how well the patients recovered. Instead, the doctors would have to take detailed measurements of the patients’ temperature, breathing, heart rate, and so on in comparison to patients that didn’t take the lianhua qingwen medication.
From morning to night, Director Yang worked hard constantly for three days in a row. After this time, some younger and stronger flu patients were already showing obvious signs of improvement. Based on the data so far, lianhua qingwen’s effects were definitely far better than oseltamivir’s at dealing with the flu symptoms.
This was effective! Everyone in Chasu City Hospital could heave a slight sigh of relief. A doctor would always feel sad about having no effective methods or techniques to deal with an illness while being only able to watch the patient fight against the illness by themselves.
Soon, patients kept being discharged in large numbers. Gradually, no more patients remained in the hospital’s main hallway. Only some patients in serious condition remained. One week later, on Monday morning, Superintendent Ouyang happily announced that the period of exceptional measures was over, and that all doctors could return to their own departments or vacation.
The governmental higher-ups soon issued rewards as well. It would make everyone lose morale if no reward was issued in such a situation. For a workplace like a hospital, since everyone worked in a team, there would rarely be individual awards for only a single person as everyone had helped out. It would also be bad to have individual awards as that would make it harder for others to develop as everyone was supposed to be a team.
Every hospital staff member was awarded 1,000 yuan as bonus money! Chasu City Hospital was also issued a gold commemorative badge.
Director Yang didn’t participate in the award ceremony. Although he hadn’t caught the flu in the end, he had worked extremely hard, which was a bit much for him as he was almost 70 years old already. Now that all the flu epidemic patients had left, Director Yang gave a thick stack of data on the flu patients to Superintendent Ouyang before slowly trudging home. He only wanted to sleep for as long as he possibly could!
After the award ceremony, it was now time to self-reflect and find problems. In the medical system, self-reflections were required to be especially severe. This wasn’t only about correcting mistakes.
The strictness of medicine was all in order to ensure that no mistakes which would lead to medical incidents were made.
The hospital administrator director had a stern expression as he spoke to Zhang Fan and the other rotation doctors and nurses from the respiratory department. “What mistakes did you make! All of you, tell me by yourselves! Doctors go first.”
Everyone looked at Zhang Fan when it was his turn. He had to think his very best if he had made any mistakes at all during this time. However, he was absolutely confident that he hadn’t made a single medical mistake!
“I should have stood in between patient #8 and patient #9 so that patient #8 wouldn’t have been able to watch me perform surgery.” There was no helping it. This was the only problem that Zhang Fan could identify with his own work!
Everyone else also self-reflected on their own mistakes! This was the medical field, a really strict field of work that required extra caution. Was this going overboard? Not at all, because experience could only be gained this way!
Lianhua qingwen became a famous medication due to this incident! Traditional Chinese medicine wasn’t such a garbage many people thought it was! Chinese people had just forgotten how to use it properly!