Come on, Dr. Wu

Chapter 479 Patient Selection
Now that a preliminary treatment plan has been determined, the medical team led by Wu Xiaofu believes, after careful consideration, that the disease cannot be delayed any longer, especially for the four seriously ill cases who need to race against time to be treated.

However, the first case is relatively special and can be handled by the experienced Wu Xiaofu.

As for the other three severe cases, since their symptoms involve more professional and complex areas, it would be difficult for Wu Xiaofu alone to treat them, so they must be transferred to specialized orthopedics and neurosurgery for targeted specialist treatment.

At the same time, the remaining nine patients also quickly completed a comprehensive and detailed evaluation. In order to ensure that these ten patients could receive the most appropriate and effective treatment, the entire hospital worked together and organized a large-scale hospital-wide consultation.

When it came to the three patients who needed to be transferred to orthopedics and neurosurgery, experts from the two departments came together to discuss the best treatment strategy.

After a lively and in-depth discussion, everyone finally agreed that with the First Affiliated Hospital's strong medical strength and superb medical skills, it is fully capable of successfully meeting these challenges.

After all, as a leading medical institution in the country, the First Affiliated Hospital has gathered many top talents in the industry and has advanced medical equipment and cutting-edge diagnosis and treatment technologies.

Although this parasitic disease may seem terrifying, all problems can be solved if its location can be accurately located and completely removed through surgery, as such an operation is still within the scope of existing mature medical technology.

Therefore, the orthopedic and neurosurgery doctors were full of confidence. After all, they had conducted a detailed assessment of the physical conditions of the three patients and unanimously agreed that these patients were fully capable of persisting until the end of the surgery.

For other patients who are interested in undergoing surgery, it is no problem. However, the real thorny problem still focuses on the patient that Wu Xiaofu is responsible for.

In the past few days, Wu Xiaofu racked his brains to tailor a recovery plan for the patient. He not only carefully matched various nutritional supplements, but also cleverly combined the use of Chinese and Western medicines.

Every decision is made with great caution, because it is necessary to avoid excessive medication, which would increase the patient's physical burden, and to prevent insufficient medication from resulting in the inability to adjust the patient's physical condition to the standard suitable for surgery in a short period of time.

Just to draw up this recovery plan took Wu Xiaofu an entire night of hard work.

However, as the saying goes, "God will not let down those who work hard", after half a month of unremitting efforts, the patient's physical condition finally improved significantly and reached a relatively ideal state. Wu Xiaofu did not dare to delay and immediately arranged an operation for the patient.

It is still a minimally invasive surgery. Now for Wu Xiaofu, the time required for both minimally invasive surgery and traditional open surgery is almost the same.

Because of this, whenever he faces the critical moment of choosing a surgical method for a patient, he always prefers the one that allows the patient to recover more quickly. However, there is a prerequisite that cannot be ignored - that is, the patient does not care about the cost of the operation.

operating room.

At this moment, the operation was proceeding in an orderly manner. Before long, Wu Xiaofu successfully reached the critical step of removing the lesion.

After careful examination, it was found that the patient's common bile duct was completely infested with parasites, just as discovered during the puncture!

Faced with such a situation, it is almost a luxury to try to preserve the common bile duct because it is too severely damaged. So the only option now is to completely remove the common bile duct as planned before the operation.

However, this is fundamentally different from the common cholecystectomy. Usually, even if the cholecystectomy is performed, the patient's common bile duct can still be preserved, or connected to the jejunum through fistulas, thereby guiding the bile in the patient's body to be discharged smoothly through the intestines.

In this way, although the patient may encounter some digestive problems after the operation, the overall impact is still within a controllable range. But in this case, if the common bile duct is also removed, it basically means that the patient's entire bile duct system is difficult to preserve.

If the common bile duct is completely removed, the bile will basically lose its circulation channel. You know, bile is a substance secreted by stem cells in the liver! It plays a vital role in the human body's digestive process!

Once the common bile duct is removed, the patient's liver is like a factory that only focuses on producing products without paying any attention to transportation and sales.

In this way, the patient's physical condition will naturally not be limited to some simple digestive problems! However, there is nothing we can do about it. After all, it is much better to do this than to watch the body gradually being dragged down by the disease.

Let alone the condition of the common bile duct, the liver itself was now like a shattered hornet's nest, with almost no intact area. However, each damaged area was only slightly affected.

Before this, Wu Xiaofu even seriously considered whether it was necessary to perform a liver transplant on this patient. But after careful consideration, he finally gave up the idea. The reason was that the patient's liver function did not have any substantial obstacles or problems.

The real problem that is troubling patients right now is that there are unfortunately a large number of parasites living inside the liver.

If these pests that are parasitic in the patient's liver can be successfully eliminated, the patient's original liver can still return to normal operation and continue to perform its due functions.

To this end, before the operation, Wu Xiaofu sat in front of the computer and used computer software to restore the patient's liver condition one-to-one.

After some effort, a lifelike virtual liver model appeared on the screen. Then, Wu Xiaofu began to carefully compare the proportion of the area of ​​the patient's liver infested by parasites with the entire liver.

Surprisingly, although the patient's liver looked like a hornet's nest, in fact, only about one-seventh of the area was actually parasitized. This discovery made Wu Xiaofu feel a little relieved and also gave him a clearer idea of ​​the next treatment plan.

More importantly, during the previous puncture examination, Wu Xiaofu keenly noticed that these parasites had some unique characteristics.

When they parasitize, they do not penetrate deep into the patient's organs, but mostly attach to the superficial part of the liver. This means that the deep tissues of the patient's liver are basically not affected and the function is still intact. Based on this situation, Wu Xiaofu realized that he had considerable flexibility in choosing surgical options.

He designed two feasible plans: one was to directly perform a surface resection of the liver, completely remove the part invaded by parasites, and then carefully treat the wound.

The second is to adopt a more sophisticated method - selective liver resection, which is like carefully picking out "wasp" from a hornet's nest, accurately removing the parasites and retaining as much healthy liver tissue as possible.

From the perspective of technical difficulty, it is undoubtedly much more difficult to select them one by one. You know, the liver is an organ with a relatively fragile texture and can easily rupture if you are not careful.

Not only that, but its interior is densely packed with intricate nerves and blood vessels, and even during routine liver resections, doctors must be careful to avoid these potential "mines." And now, picking out those parasites one by one is simply a thrilling mine-clearing operation!

Furthermore, these parasites are not easy to mess with. If you want to completely eliminate them, you often need to go a step further and use normal liver tissue to wrap the parasites and then take them out of the body.

Therefore, even if the area of ​​the liver occupied by the parasites is only one-seventh of the entire liver, the healthy part of the liver that the patient can retain after surgery will inevitably be less than five-sevenths.

The most crucial point is that the technical requirements for this operation are extremely high.

Just imagine that if at any stage in the entire surgical process, the surgeon made even a minor mistake like hand tremors, and accidentally touched the location where the parasites were located - an area as sensitive and dangerous as a "hornet's nest", it is very likely that they would react violently like igniting a powder keg, and even trigger a terrible "riot"!
Once this happens, the consequences are unimaginable. The operation will undoubtedly fail, and the parasites that were originally firmly confined within a specific range and seemed to be behaving themselves will start to run wild like wild horses and destroy the fragile liver tissue crazily.

This will undoubtedly cause far more severe and serious harm to the patient than before, causing the condition to further deteriorate to an unmanageable level.

In contrast, choosing to perform liver surface resection is much simpler. Of course, even with such a relatively simple surgical method, it is still necessary to pay close attention to the complex blood vessels and nerves deep inside the patient's liver and other important tissue structures.

However, for Wu Xiaofu, who possessed extraordinary mental strength, this was not a difficult problem at all. However, it cannot be ignored that such a large area of ​​wound would inevitably bring considerable trauma and burden to the patient's body.

The postoperative recovery speed is obviously much slower than the latter option, and because the liver function is severely damaged, patients also face many potential risks and challenges during the recovery period.

Therefore, after careful consideration, Wu Xiaofu was still more inclined to let the patient choose the second surgical option.

The reason is simple. Although the first surgical option involves a wider range of options, it cannot be ignored that the human liver itself has a very good healing ability. As long as the follow-up care is proper, recovery is actually not too difficult.

Wu Xiaofu is confident about both of these two different surgical methods. However, one thing that needs to be made clear is that surgery cannot be performed arbitrarily according to personal wishes.

Given that there are currently two feasible surgical plans, no matter what, they must be explained in detail to the patient and his family one by one.

As a doctor, you can give appropriate advice based on your professional knowledge and experience and tell patients which option may be more appropriate. However, you must never make the final decision for them on the grounds that the patients know little about medicine. This behavior is absolutely unacceptable and should never be allowed.

Therefore, before the operation officially began, Wu Xiaofu once again held an in-depth and comprehensive communication meeting with the patient and his family.

During the meeting, he laid out all three possible surgical options on the table without reservation, and explained them to the patient clearly and thoroughly, so that the patient could fully understand the pros and cons of each option and make the decision that best suits his or her actual situation.

Among them, the third option is liver transplantation. Usually, this extreme measure is only considered when all other methods are not feasible. Therefore, it is also the option that Wu Xiaofu least recommends to patients among the three options.

Moreover, the successful performance of liver replacement surgery is subject to many strict objective conditions, the most critical of which is the need for a suitable and available liver source.

However, the reality is that there are so many patients waiting for liver sources that they will not be able to get a turn in the short term. If they want a liver transplant, they can only get a suitable liver from their family members.

Of course, this patient is not so selfish as to ask his children to match and donate their livers. After all, for any parent, even if the children are extremely filial and willing to donate their livers to them, it is still a matter of careful consideration and careful weighing.

What's more, there are now three plans in front of us. Wu Xiaofu also said that liver transplantation surgery itself faces a series of difficult problems such as rejection. Even the experienced doctor Wu Xiaofu does not recommend taking this approach. As a result, both the patient and his family naturally gave up the idea.

As for the two solutions mentioned above, they are actually not difficult to understand.

Dr. Wu Xiaofu explained the situation in detail to the patient and his family, clearly pointing out the operational procedures involved in each plan as well as the difficulties and challenges that may be encountered, and comparing the difficulty levels of each plan one by one.

After this in-depth analysis, the patient and his family had a clear understanding of the characteristics of each plan. Unexpectedly, after listening to the risk introduction of the two plans, the patient and his family did not hesitate at all and decisively chose the second plan.

After all, in their opinion, no matter how powerful Wu Xiaofu's skills are, no matter how confident Wu Xiaofu is, he is still a human being, not a god. What lies before them now is the patient's life, so the safer the better, and the slower the subsequent recovery, the better.

They also looked up some relevant information and found out how much of the liver surface can be removed and that subsequent recovery will not be difficult.

(End of this chapter)