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

Harrison did not ask any theoretical questions.

"When starting blind dissection, the angle of the back of the scissors against the muscle bundle should be such that, when advancing to the third millimeter against the fiber direction, you should feel the elastic feedback at your fingertips—"

He paused for a moment.

Is it ductile rebound or brittle slip?

The classroom fell silent.

It wasn't the normal kind of quiet. It was the kind of quiet where 160 people simultaneously stopped all movement.

This problem is on a completely different level from the previous ones.

Everyone before me asked about theories, parameters, coefficient tables—things that could be written into textbooks. Yamada asked about the stitch spacing, Williams asked about the patch curvature, and Andrei presented replica data.

Harrison asked about the feeling in the fingertips.

Someone who has only read academic papers or watched videos would not be able to ask this kind of question.

Only someone who has personally done it and stumbled in that position would describe the tactile sensation of that moment during the operation in this way.

Gao Haiping turned around in the second row and his eyebrows furrowed.

Liu Jianmin gripped the pen tightly, and the pen barrel creaked.

Andrei didn't turn around, but his left hand, which was resting on the armrest, slowly closed up.

On the podium, Ye Zhen looked at the person sitting on a canvas stool at the end of the last row of the corridor.

Her gaze lingered on him for two seconds.

He slowly placed the red chalk in his right hand onto the podium. He rubbed his finger across the chalk surface to wipe away any loose chalk.

Then she spoke.

"How many times did you try?"

Harrison's Adam's apple bobbed up and down.

He remained silent for three seconds.

Then he spoke.

"Eighteen times."

Several pens in the first three rows lifted off the paper at the same time.

"Using pig hearts for simulation. All attempts failed."

He lowered his voice and spoke each word very slowly, so slowly that even the person in the far corner of the classroom could hear him clearly.

"The coronary artery wall—it ruptured every time."

No one made a sound in the classroom.

President-elect of the American College of Cardiac Surgery.

Forty years of practice.

I practiced the procedure on a pig's heart eighteen times in my own lab, but I still couldn't do it.

Ye Zhen used a pair of ophthalmic scissors, which cost 1.2 yuan to manufacture, to make a newborn baby in one go.

Ye Zhen looked at Harrison.

Her expression remained unchanged. There was no mockery, no sentimentality, not even a superfluous pause.

"Your attack point is a bit too high!"

She turned around, picked up a piece of red chalk, walked to the last blank space in the lower right corner of the blackboard, and drew a close-up view.

The orientation of the three layers of muscle fibers is represented by parallel lines in three different directions: the outermost layer is transverse, the middle layer is oblique, and the innermost layer is longitudinal.

"The first two millimeters of reverse fiber propulsion are tough and resilient."

She drew a bracket in the first two millimeters and wrote two words next to it—"Resilience".

"Brittle slip begins to appear at the third millimeter."

The right end of the parentheses extends outward by one millimeter, and next to it is written—brittleness.

"This transition point is the boundary of the outer edge of the coronary artery wall. It is the only basis for you to decide whether to stop the surgery or continue."

She drew a thin red line at the transition point and marked it with an arrow.

A number is written next to the arrow.

35.

"What's your angle of approach?"

Harrison's answer came almost spontaneously.

"Forty degrees."

Ye Zhen tapped the number 35 on the blackboard.

"Five degrees difference."

She drew a 40-degree comparison diagram next to 35. The two tangent lines started from the same point, with an angle difference of only the width of a chalk tip. But at the third millimeter mark, the endpoints of the two lines shifted by almost the entire thickness of the coronary artery wall.

"When you cut in at a 40-degree angle, the blade of the scissors sits precisely on the middle layer of fibers in the coronary artery wall at the 3-millimeter mark. The direction of the fibers is parallel to the direction of the blade. With a push of the scissors, the fibers are split open to both sides."

She drew a slit at the end of the forty-degree arc.

"The wall broke."

Her pen tip slid to the 35-degree endpoint.

"The blade cuts in at a 35-degree angle, and at the 3-millimeter mark, it gets stuck at the junction of the outer and middle layers of fibers. The fiber direction forms a 15-degree angle with the blade. When you push it in, the scissors will be naturally pushed towards the outer layer by the elastic recoil force of the fibers."

She drew a smooth arc at the 35-degree endpoint. The arc bypassed the outer edge of the coronary artery wall without touching the inner wall.

"The wall won't break."

She put the red chalk back on the podium and dusted off her hands.

"A difference of five degrees. There is no difference in the first two millimeters. The third millimeter is the dividing line between broken and unbroken."

Harrison stood in the last row.

Behind the gold-rimmed glasses, his eyes were fixed on the endpoints of the two lines on the blackboard, while one hand gripped the edge of the notebook tightly.

He raised his pen and filled an entire page with dense notes.

The only sound in the classroom was the scratching of pens on paper.

One hundred and sixty-one pens, writing the same set of data almost simultaneously.

Ye Zhen stood on the podium for five seconds, waiting for everyone to finish copying the diagram.

"Any more questions?"

No one raised their hand.

She picked up the glass of water from the long table, took a sip, and put the glass down.

"If anyone here has actual clinical data to add, please come up and speak."

She pushed the microphone forward two inches.

Yamada raised his hand.

Ye Zhen nodded to him.

Yamada stood up from the third row and walked to the podium faster than Andrei, his steps quick and hurried. He paused the miniature recorder on his chest as he stood up.

He opened a printed document filled with pencil annotations, unfolded it, and placed it on the podium.

"I'd like to add a set of data from Tokyo Women's Medical University Hospital."

His English had a distinct Japanese accent, with vowels drawn out slightly, but he pronounced numbers precisely to one decimal place.

"From 1979 to 1984, our hospital performed 217 radical surgeries for Tetralogy of Fallot. Five-year follow-up revealed cases requiring repeat thoracotomy due to patch calcification or right ventricular outflow tract obstruction—"

He drew a line on the material with his fingernail.

"Twenty-six cases, with a reoperation rate of 11.9 percent."

He raised his head.

"This almost perfectly matches the 12% that Dr. Ye just mentioned."

These words made the air in the classroom even heavier. That "twelve percent" was no longer just a number from Ye Zhen's mouth, but was backed up and verified by independent data from another country.

Yamada didn't sit down. He turned to the last page of the document.

"If Dr. Yeh's parachute-style continuous suturing combined with autologous pericardium is used, the calcification rate can be reduced to 0.3% over five years."

His voice lowered, as if he were confirming that what he was saying was not a dream.

"This means that of the 26 reoperations performed at our hospital over the past five years, 25 could have been avoided."

He closed the document and bowed almost ninety degrees to Ye Zhen.

He returned to his seat.

A low murmur of conversation filled the classroom—French, German, and Korean mixed together, all at a low volume, like water bubbling in a pot but not bubbling over.

Williams rose from his seat, holding onto the back of the chair, seemingly preparing to go on stage as well.

Ye Zhen glanced at him and slightly raised her hand.

"Due to time constraints, written materials can be submitted to the organizing committee for unified compilation after the meeting."

Her gaze swept from the first row to the last row.

"If you still have questions, ask them now."

The classroom fell silent again.

Several people raised their hands, then slowly lowered them.

Yamada's speech just now raised the level of discussion in the entire venue to an extremely high level—it would be beneath him to casually raise a trivial theoretical question and follow along.