Surgery Godfather
Chapter 1221 - 946: Upgrade On The Spot

Chapter 1221: Chapter 946: Upgrade On The Spot

The next day, Yang Ping went to the CCU to check on Mr. Karen’s postoperative condition.

Professor Yang’s rounds were destined to draw a crowd, so as soon as Yang Ping stood by the bedside, the room was already packed three layers deep inside and out with doctors, from the senior attending and associate chief physicians to the young Doctors, Masters, standardized training students, and interns, all crowding around Yang Ping.

Xia Shu reported Mr. Karen’s postoperative condition in the CCU. Currently, his vital signs were stable without the need for ECMO support. The stability of his vital signs was maintained by his own heart, which was remarkable for Mr. Karen.

Prior to this, to decrease the load on the heart and preserve the scant heart function, Mr. Karen had been relying on ECMO to sustain his life. Even when he was transported to China on a medical plane, he was still on ECMO support.

Now, having undergone surgery, his decrepit heart had been repaired and rebuilt, allowing it to function normally and fully support Mr. Karen’s life.

After listening to Xia Shu’s report, Yang Ping took the tablet handed over by Xia Shu and began to review Mr. Karen’s latest test results. Patient electronic medical record updates are always faster than paperwork, and all test results are first uploaded to the internal network’s electronic platform, as the paper reports would require a cumbersome process to reach the doctors: issuing the report, personal delivery to the department, and the physician in charge or intern doctor placing the report in the patient file. This process could sometimes take several days, so doctors prefer to check the information on the computer for timeliness.

In a critical care unit like the CCU, there are a lot of tests every day, and often the number of tests in one day can exceed those during the entire hospital stay in a regular ward. Yang Ping checked the results meticulously, focusing on the various blood tests.

Complete blood count, biochemistry, liver and kidney function, myocardial enzyme spectrum, procalcitonin, and others - all had been retested postoperatively. Judging from the test results, the infection was completely under control. Infections with local lesions, like the one Mr. Karen had, respond dramatically to surgical intervention. Once the source of the infection is cleared, the infection is usually quickly controlled, with any remaining infection rapidly eliminated by antibiotics and the body’s own immune response.

Common examples of localized infection include various abscesses, which, when drained or cleared by surgery, are rapidly brought under control. Without surgical intervention, relying solely on internal medical treatment, even the most advanced antibiotics would struggle to be effective.

Mr. Karen suffered from bacterial endocarditis, with the infected heart valves, abscesses, and vegetations constituting the source of infection. Without clearing these lesions, the infection simply could not be controlled. Now that the surgery had thoroughly cleared these lesions and replaced them with new valves, the infection was contained. As long as his heart function returned to normal, Mr. Karen’s condition would quickly improve.

The physician from Sweden who was following the rounds kept diligently taking notes, meticulously recording both in diagrams and text. He even sketched Mr. Karen’s bed in the CCU, the arrangement of various equipment in the room, and the monitoring data from the machines, and so on.

Song Zimo glanced and noticed that the Swedish doctor’s notes were as detailed as a comic book. To achieve speed in recording, his figures looked like the trendy stick figure drawings, incredibly succinct.

Having reviewed the electronic medical records, Yang Ping prepared to conduct a bedside echocardiography, a test that needed to be repeated postoperatively.

Xia Shu brought over the ultrasound machine to perform the echocardiography on the patient. Echocardiography can provide qualitative diagnosis for some heart diseases and quantitative analysis of heart structure, valve morphology, wall movement, and hemodynamic state. It assesses the heart’s morphology, structure, including chamber size, wall thickness, valve opening and closing, and myocardial movement, etc.

Therefore, echocardiography is one of the most commonly used tests in cardiac surgery. During the perioperative period, which includes preoperative, intraoperative, and postoperative periods, echocardiography is an indispensable diagnostic and evaluation tool.

In China, echocardiography is generally performed by sonographers, with few cardiologists or cardiac surgeons capable of understanding the principles and operation of echocardiography; most doctors are outsiders to this practice.

Unlike in China, in Europe and the United States, both cardiologists and cardiac surgeons must perform echocardiography themselves. They start receiving comprehensive training and practice in this area during their residency, so echocardiography is an essential skill that every specialist must master proficiently.

The founder of echocardiography in the United States, Dr. Feigenbaum, is not a sonography doctor but a cardiologist. Cardiac surgeons or cardiologists, with their clinical experience, know how to master the principles and use of echocardiography, perfectly combining clinical work with imaging.

Whereas a sonography doctor will never lead a heart surgery in their lifetime, lacking clinical experience in heart diseases, they only have knowledge in imaging. Therefore, combining clinical and imaging knowledge is more advantageous for the advancement of echocardiography.

The father of echocardiography in China is Professor Wang Xinfang from the Ultrasound Department of Wuhan Union Hospital, who has made significant contributions to the field of ultrasound and is internationally recognized as the pioneer in fetal heart monitoring.

In the 1960s, obstetricians in China could only rely on listening and touching to understand the fetal conditions in the womb, unable to hear the fetal heartbeat. In 1963, during an ultrasound examination on a pregnant woman, Professor Wang noticed an extra blip on the ultrasound machine, which he speculated was the result of fetal limb activity. Immediately, he wondered whether it was possible to monitor the fetal heartbeat using this method. Professor Wang began his trials, using two ultrasound probes—one connected to the mother’s heart and the other to the fetus’s heart, producing two waveforms of different speeds. After numerous observations, he discovered the fetal heartbeat reflections. That year, Professor Wang published an article in a domestic medical journal, presenting the world’s first fetal heartbeat wave frequency curve. In 2002, based on this article, the world ultrasound community finally affirmed that China was the first to discover fetal heart ultrasound