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

The emergency room was in complete chaos.

The iron gate was suddenly pushed open from the outside, and a strong smell of blood mixed with the pungent smell of Lysol hit everyone's nostrils.

Ye Zhen strode in, scanning the entire emergency room in just half a second. Without pausing, she walked straight to the blood-soaked stretcher.

Worker Lao Liu lay on it, with a rusty, two-finger-thick, mud-covered rebar sticking out high in front of his chest.

The steel bar pierced diagonally from below his left shoulder blade in his back, exiting through his left chest. Dark red blood dripped down the metal threads, forming a large puddle on the floor. With Old Liu's weak breathing, the heavy steel bar trembled slightly in the air.

Wang Jianguo stood by the bed, his white coat splattered with blood. He shook his head repeatedly, preparing to have the nurse remove the old-fashioned defibrillator from the side. Seeing Ye Zhen approaching, he reached out and blocked the stretcher.

"Xiao Ye, you can't move."

Wang Jianguo's voice was filled with genuine despair. This wasn't shirking responsibility, but rather the helplessness of a veteran surgeon who had stood on the operating table for twenty years when faced with the limits of human capability.

"We just took an X-ray at the bedside, and the steel bar is right against the pericardium. Even if it's only pulled out by a millimeter, the resulting pressure change could cause massive intracardiac hemorrhage." Wang Jianguo's eyes were red. "Several surgical directors in our hospital have just examined him, and he's in serious trouble."

Ye Zhen didn't respond to him at all. She reached out and snatched the X-ray film, which had just been taken out of the darkroom and was still dripping with washing fluid, from Wang Jianguo's hand, and turned to walk towards the viewing lightbox on the wall.

With a soft "snap," the lightbox lit up with white light.

Ye Zhen held up the film with both hands, her eyes scanning it rapidly. In just five seconds, a complete three-dimensional anatomical model of the chest cavity had been formed in her mind. The trajectory of the threaded steel bar, the direction of deflection caused by the metal texture, and the precise millimeter distance from the pericardium all matched perfectly.

Ye Zhen put down the film and turned to look at Wang Jianguo and several deputy directors.

"His heart wasn't pierced."

The moment those four words were uttered, the entire emergency room fell into a deathly silence.

Ye Zhen pointed to the edge of the shadow on the X-ray and said with certainty, "The rebar used in construction has spiral ribs on its surface. This structure causes it to deflect clockwise when penetrating muscle tissue. This rebar slid past the pericardium at a distance of two millimeters because of the obstruction of the ribs, only grazing the outermost layer of the pericardium."

"The real source of bleeding that is causing his hemorrhagic shock is the right lower lobe venous trunk, which was torn apart by the barbs at the end of the steel bar."

A deputy director standing nearby wiped the sweat from his brow and immediately retorted, "Dr. Ye, the venous trunk in the lower lobe of the right lung has been torn. Once the chest is opened to relieve the pressure, the negative pressure in the chest cavity will disappear, and blood will instantly fill the pulmonary tube! The patient won't even last until you remove the steel bar; he'll drown in his own blood on the spot!"

Ye Zhen turned around and slammed the medical record folder in her hand onto the ambulance.

"The situation you described won't happen." Her tone was completely flat, stating an irrefutable medical fact. "There is currently more than 500 milliliters of blood in the right pleural cavity. The weight of the blood itself has compressed the ruptured vein, forming an extremely fragile temporary hydraulic arrest."

"As long as we open the chest quickly enough and block the right hilum within three seconds, we can prevent reflux."

Ye Zhen glanced at her watch: "From now on, we only have a 40-minute surgical window. After 40 minutes, even a miracle won't save us."

"Push him to operating room number one!"

Without uttering a single word, she grabbed the iron railings of the stretcher herself. Wang Jianguo gritted his teeth and quickly went to help push the stretcher.

The heavy stretcher wheels rumbled as they rolled over the terrazzo floor tiles.

A group of people pushed Lao Liu out of the emergency room. The corridor was crowded with construction workers in dirty shirts. Foreman Lao Zhao stood at the front, clutching a fiberglass safety helmet covered in mortar tightly in his hand, his eyes red as he stared at the stretcher that was being pushed out.

The moment the stretcher was pushed over, Old Zhao suddenly took a heavy step to the side, making way for Ye Zhen to pass.

Ye Zhen stopped as she passed by him: "Where are your family members?"

Old Zhao quickly turned around and pulled a woman who was trembling so much she could barely stand out of the crowd. Erni, wearing a tattered coarse cloth floral jacket, trembled as she took the surgical consent form from Liu Xiaohe. Her fingers shook as she crookedly drew a large X where her signature was.

Ye Zhen took the paper directly and carefully placed it into the medical record folder.

"Leave the man to me."

Ye Zhen left those four words behind and strode towards the operating room. The heavy radiation-proof iron door slowly closed behind her, and the red "Operating in Progress" indicator light above the door frame lit up instantly.

The noise outside the corridor subsided on its own, and the workers squatted in the corners, waiting in the simplest silence for God's judgment.

The air conditioning in the operating room was on full blast.

Ye Zhen stepped onto the operating table, put on sterile gloves, and methodically issued instructions. Wang Jianguo had just picked up the sternotomy shears when Ye Zhen's words froze him in place.

"Secure the steel bars securely; no one is allowed to move them."

Wang Jianguo was stunned.

"A conventional midline thoracotomy would be blocked by steel bars, and a lateral thoracotomy wouldn't expose the hilum of the lung." Ye Zhen opened her hand, and the scrub nurse immediately slapped a sharp scalpel into her palm. "Perform a clamshell bilateral thoracotomy."

Wang Jianguo gasped in shock; this was a destructive incision rarely used in trauma surgery.

"Damage control in this surgery is divided into three steps. The first step is to transversely sever the sternum, without removing the steel bars, and directly lift the chest wall from above to expose the pericardium and bilateral pulmonary hilum."

Before she finished speaking, the sharp blade smoothly sliced ​​through the skin and subcutaneous tissue along the fourth intercostal space. The sternum was quickly cut open by the wire saw, and Ye Zhen used a chest expander to pull the entire anterior chest wall, along with the transverse steel bar, upwards, completely exposing the shocking scene inside the chest cavity to the sterile light.

"Her blood pressure has dropped to 70!" The anesthesiologist was sweating profusely.

Holding long forceps, Ye Zhen precisely probed into the blood-filled right chest cavity: "Second step, control the bleeding source! Director Wang, prepare to take over the forceps and clamp the hilum!"

She looped the occlusion bandage handed to her by the nurse around the beating heart and through the right hilum of the lung. With a quick pull of two fingers, Wang Jianguo understood and quickly clamped both ends tightly with large hemostats. The surging bleeding visibly decreased, and the suction device was turned up to the maximum, "slurping" away the blood accumulated in the field of vision.

Taking advantage of the brief moment of clear vision, Ye Zhen's hand was as steady as a rock. With extremely precise non-traumatic forceps, she picked out the ruptured right lower lobe venous trunk, and a hemostat followed up neatly, firmly biting the wound.

The bleeding has stopped completely.

"Step two complete! Preparing for step three—reverse rotation to remove the rebar, cleaning and reopening the wound!"