Chapter 271 - 179: Cytokine Storm

Chapter 271: Chapter 179: Cytokine Storm

The rain grew heavier.

Jiang He called Yang Xu.

It rang a few times before connecting. His teacher had probably just fallen asleep.

"Jiang He? What’s wrong?"

"Teacher, the ER just admitted a difficult patient. It’s Vice Dean Zhang Sui’s daughter, Zhang Jiaqi."

"Ah? What the hell? What’s the situation?"

Those few words jolted Yang Xu wide awake.

Jiang He then recounted Zhang Jiaqi’s basic vitals, the special test data just sent back from the lab, and his own model-based deductions.

"An IL-6 of 850... This is definitely not ordinary gastroenteritis. This is the very early onset of SIRS. What did Zhang Sui say? Has he seen the data?"

"He has. I pushed him with my paper and model predictions. He agreed to immediately transfer the patient to the ICU, establish a central venous line, and constantly monitor her blood gas and intra-abdominal pressure. However, based on the current SOP, he’s refusing to start prophylactic hemofiltration and targeted immune intervention right now."

"For him to go this far is already pretty good."

"Teacher, that’s why I’m calling you. I’m worried about the next step. According to our paper, if the cytokine storm fully erupts, causing massive inflammatory exudation that leads to severe abdominal compartment syndrome (ACS), or even compresses organs and causes ischemia, then we’ll have to perform an immediate decompressive laparotomy. But..."

Jiang He paused, not continuing.

Yang Xu instantly understood Jiang He’s concern. "But with the storm tonight, the hospital is already short-staffed. If it comes to a laparotomy, even if Zhang Sui agrees to the surgery, who would be the chief surgeon? Many of the hospital’s Chief Physicians are under investigation. The rest either aren’t skilled enough or don’t have the right specialty. You have the ability, but there’s no way Zhang Sui would let you lead a surgery of this level."

"Right."

Yang Xu couldn’t help but exclaim, "You kid, your mind works so fast. You’ve even planned for this step. You’ve thought of everything. Incredible."

"Teacher, can you make it back tonight?"

"I definitely can’t get back tonight," Yang Xu decided immediately. "You keep a close eye on the ICU. I’ll contact a few of my chief physician friends in Yangcheng and see who can get to Affiliated Hospital No. 1 right away."

"Understood."

Jiang He hung up and glanced at the time.

It had been over three hours since Jiaqi was admitted.

All the necessary arrangements had been made.

Now, all he could do was his best and leave the rest to fate.

...

Outside the Department of Critical Care Medicine.

Zhang Sui stood before the observation window, on the verge of collapse.

His daughter was lying inside.

The girl who had been so full of life just a day ago was now connected to the leads of an ECG monitor, a central venous catheter inserted into her neck.

Tubes of varying thickness formed an invisible net, pinning her frail body to the hospital bed.

Tears streamed down his face.

Zhang Sui couldn’t help but think back to many years ago.

Back then, Jiaqi was still little, wearing a pink dress, her eyes sparkling.

Every time he came home from work, as soon as the lock clicked, she would shoot out of the living room like a little cannonball, hug his leg, and tilt her head up, calling out sweetly:

"Daddy, hug!"

She would hold up a crayon drawing she’d made, presenting it to him like a treasure.

The drawing showed a family of three, holding hands and basking in the sun on a lawn.

When did it all change?

Zhang Sui closed his eyes, his mind filled with images of his daughter from the past few years:

Her hair dyed an outrageous color, her face painted with heavy, smoky makeup, wearing ripped jeans, screaming at him like a porcupine.

"Aside from your rules and regulations, aside from your hospital, have you ever cared about this family?!"

"You don’t get to tell me what I become!"

Skipping class, going to karaoke bars, hanging out with those delinquent-looking students.

Zhang Sui wanted to discipline her, but he found that his daughter had locked herself in a shell he couldn’t possibly penetrate. He was at a complete loss.

But what Zhang Sui didn’t know was that beneath her rebellious facade, Zhang Jiaqi actually had two sides...

...

From Zhang Jiaqi’s perspective, the word "father" was completely absent from her life.

She would never forget the time her mother fainted at home with a high fever. Her father, at the hospital, said he was busy and simply refused to come back.

At every parent-teacher conference, the seat next to hers was always empty.

The day her parents went to the Civil Affairs Bureau to get their divorce certificate, her mother asked if they should have dinner together afterward. But her father chose to go to the hospital for his rounds on time, without a shred of hesitation.

So she hated him.

In truth, when living alone with her mother, Zhang Jiaqi was a very well-behaved girl.

She would help her mom with the dishes and do her homework quietly in her room. Her grades were even among the top in her class.

But the moment she knew she was going to see her father, she would immediately change into her rebellious uniform.

Pierced ears, temporary tattoos, the heaviest makeup—she did whatever was most outrageous.

She just wanted to piss him off.

She wanted to see that eternally calm father of hers, the vice dean, wear an expression of helpless fury.

It was as if only by seeing him angry could she feel that she finally existed in his eyes.

She went to the karaoke bar tonight because Zhang Sui had stood her up.

He had promised to have dinner with her.

But in the end, he was a no-show.

Zhang Jiaqi, trembling with anger, immediately contacted Chen Jiahao and Li Qiuyue.

In the ER waiting area, Zhang Sui had detested Chen Jiahao and Li Qiuyue, thinking they were delinquents who were a bad influence on his daughter.

But in reality, those two classmates were great.

In the private karaoke room, no one was actually drinking.

The dozen beers on the table were purely to meet the room’s minimum charge. For a group of students in ’08, it was also a prop to look cool and worldly.

The four or five of them would get together and sing all night, and they wouldn’t even finish a single bottle.

Zhang Jiaqi thought beer tasted awful. When the waiter wasn’t looking, she secretly filled her thermos with sweet drinks and iced juice.

Chen Jiahao and Li Qiuyue sat beside her the whole time, taking turns comforting her.

"Qiqi, don’t be angry. Doctors are all like that, working nonstop when they get busy," Li Qiuyue said, tearing open a bag of chips and handing it to her.

Chen Jiahao scratched his head. "Yeah, my dad’s a car mechanic, he’s never home either. Have some skewers to cool off. You won’t feel so bad after you eat."

They ordered a pile of fried food, skewers, and a large pitcher of iced drinks.

Zhang Jiaqi channeled her grief and anger into her appetite, stuffing her face.

She actually held a secret in her heart that she’d never told anyone.

She wanted to study medicine.

She wanted to see for herself if becoming a doctor really gave you a free pass to neglect your family.

If it meant you didn’t even have time to care for your wife when she was sick.

If it meant you couldn’t even spare the time to have a single meal with your daughter.

She didn’t believe it.

She felt these were all just excuses Zhang Sui used to hide his selfishness.

She planned to put on a white coat herself and expose her father’s lies.

But she never expected that binge eating and a life of reversed day and night would lead to such a tragedy.

The father and daughter were separated by a pane of ICU glass, and by years of insurmountable misunderstanding.

Zhang Sui looked at his daughter on the hospital bed, his heart filled with remorse.

He felt like a failed father, unable to control her when he wanted to, and unable to find a way to love her.

Just then, the phone in his pocket began to vibrate.

He took it out and saw his ex-wife’s name flashing on the screen.

He took a deep breath, walked to a secluded corner of the hallway, and answered the call.

"Zhang Sui! What the hell is wrong with Jiaqi?!"

The call had just connected when his ex-wife’s frantic voice came through. The sound of airport announcements could be heard in the background.

"She... She’s in the ICU now. The preliminary diagnosis is acute pancreatitis, with a possible... tendency toward a severe case."

"Possible? Tendency? Aren’t you a great expert? Aren’t you a vice dean? You can’t even confirm what’s wrong with your own daughter?!"

"I’m following procedure. Her indicators weren’t obvious when she first arrived..." Zhang Sui tried to explain.

But after two seconds of silence, what came from the other end of the line was his ex-wife’s trembling voice, suppressed to its absolute limit:

"Zhang Sui, your whole life, all you ever talk about are your rules and regulations, your patients."

"When I was sick and had surgery, you weren’t by my side because of a consultation. I’m a doctor too. I understood it was to save a life, so I endured it."

"But now, the one lying in there is your own daughter! You’re the one who forced her to never come home, and now she’s lying on a gurney in the ER!"

"I’ve already bought a ticket for the next flight. I’m flying back from Germany right now. You listen to me, Zhang Sui. If anything happens to Jiaqi, if her treatment is delayed because of your damn rules... I will never forgive you in this life. And you won’t be able to forgive yourself even when you’re in Hell!"

BEEP, BEEP, BEEP...

The call disconnected.

The hand holding his phone dropped limply to his side.

He had no retort for his ex-wife’s words.

For some reason, at that moment, he suddenly felt so ridiculous, so cold-blooded...

As if all the strength had been drained from his body, he slowly slid down the cold, tiled wall and sat on the floor.

He buried his face in his knees, his hands plunged painfully into his hair.

Time passed.

2:15 a.m.

Inside the ICU, an extremely piercing alarm suddenly blared!

"BEEP—BEEP—BEEP—!!"

Zhang Sui shot his head up, scrambled to his feet, and rushed to the glass window.

He saw several nurses on duty already sprinting toward Bed 3.

"The patient’s blood pressure is dropping! Systolic 80, diastolic 50!"

"Heart rate is 140 beats per minute! And it’s still rising!"

"Blood oxygen saturation has dropped to 92%!"

Liu Jianbang, throwing on his white coat, burst out of the on-call room and shoved the ward door open.

The red lights on the monitor flashed wildly.

Zhang Jiaqi’s once-pale face was now flushed. Her breathing had become extremely shallow, and her chest heaved violently.

The cytokine storm, after a brief latent period, had finally detonated with devastating force.

Capillaries throughout her body began to leak profusely, and her effective circulating blood volume plummeted.

Severe Acute Pancreatitis (SAP).

Just how terrifying is this disease?

It can be understood as the pancreas turning into a knife, dissecting the abdominal cavity from the inside out.

The patient feels as if their organs are dissolving.

On the VAS pain scale, it scores a 10, the highest level.

For reference, the pain index during the late stages of cervical dilation and the expulsion phase of childbirth typically reaches a level of 8 to 10.

And amid the patient’s excruciating pain,

the golden window for doctors to save them is only a few short hours.

According to statistics from the nation’s top Class A Grade 3 hospitals,

once a patient enters the multiple organ failure stage, one out of every three admitted to the ICU will never come out.