Chapter 223 - 152: Subversion
You have to eat a meal one bite at a time, and walk a path one step at a time.
"Let's not talk about work. Time to eat."
"You got it!" Chen Hao's spirits soared. "Once this top-tier journal paper is submitted, I'm definitely writing a QQ blog post about it and pinning the screenshot right at the top! I'm going to send it to Juanzi again and again!"
Yi Xiangwan said, "Boss, are we really going to win any girls over by working ourselves to death like this for free?"
Chen Hao retorted, "Oh, shut up!"
In the morning, students began flooding into the cafeteria.
However, as they passed by, their gazes would inevitably, if subtly, drift toward one particular table.
It was a table of celebrities.
Chief Surgeon Asura, Jiang He. Pneumothorax Demon, Chen Hao.
The Southern Medical Double Killers, needless to say.
There was also the department belle, Cheng Xiyao. Her hair was a bit messy, but she still made quite a few boys secretly turn their heads for a second look.
Then there were Lu Xiaolin and Tang Pei. One was a widely acknowledged genius and upperclassman, while the other had placed first in the surgery division of last year's university-wide clinical skills competition.
Finally, there was a tall one and a short one who were always arguing... er, a pair of bickering lovebirds?
Just by sitting there, this table of people radiated an aura of academic pressure.
The surrounding students seemed to have reached a tacit understanding: don't disturb them. They would only cast respectful, adoring, or perhaps slightly envious glances as they walked past.
A true all-star team.
...
After finishing their meal, Jiang He printed out the first draft of his paper.
Then he headed straight for Affiliated Hospital No. 1.
As he passed the nurses' station in the General Surgery department, Jiang He overheard two doctors talking in low voices.
"How did it get resolved in the end?"
"How else? The hospital administration mediated, paid out one hundred fifty thousand, and the family took the money and dropped the matter."
"One hundred fifty thousand? Yes, the chief surgeon's lymph node dissection wasn't up to standard, but the patient was already in a Stage III flare-up. That payout is..."
"Sigh, don't even talk about it. That's just how things are these days. The bigger the fuss, the bigger the payout. A small fuss, a small payout. No fuss, no payout. The hospital just wanted to smooth things over. After all, there's a provincial commendation ceremony next week, and they can't have a huge scandal at this critical juncture."
"This is just ridiculous..."
Jiang He looked away and continued toward Yang Xu's office.
This was the general state of healthcare in 2008. The trust between doctors and patients was incredibly fragile, and there was no well-established mechanism for handling medical disputes.
Most of the time, hospitals could only choose to spend money to make their problems go away.
The office of the Director of Hepatobiliary Surgery.
Yang Xu sat with a freshly lit cigarette between his fingers, his brow deeply furrowed.
He heard the door open and saw it was Jiang He.
Yang Xu sighed, stubbed out his cigarette, and couldn't help but complain:
"You brat... How do you manage to show up on time every single time I light one of these? Do you just follow the smell?"
Jiang He sat down in the chair opposite him. "Smoking is bad for your health, Professor. You should cut back."
"Alright, alright, you're right." Yang Xu looked at Jiang He's slightly bloodshot eyes and asked, "Didn't sleep all night?"
"Yeah, I was running some data in the lab."
"Didn't I tell you to get some rest? If you keep this up, I'm going to have to call your girlfriend and report you."
"I just wanted to get the results out quickly."
Yang Xu fell silent at his words.
He had, after all, just been encouraging Jiang He to work hard.
'Guess I'll just shut my mouth, then...'
Getting back on topic, Yang Xu asked, "Did you run into a problem with your experiment? Is some of the data stuck, or can you not move forward with the model derivation?"
As he asked this, Yang Xu was actually feeling quite hopeful.
Ever since taking Jiang He on as a student, he had witnessed Jiang He's blind suturing and posterior approach surgery in a clinical setting, and in academia, he had seen the LNR paper...
On paper, he was Jiang He's mentor.
But in reality, he had never once heard Jiang He ask him a single academic question.
No requests for help, no asking for advice, nothing.
'How should I put it... Mentoring a genius is certainly low-maintenance, and it gives you some serious bragging rights with your colleagues.'
But sometimes, when Yang Xu sat alone in his office, he would also feel a sense of melancholy.
He felt like an incompetent teacher...
All his clinical experience and academic resources were just sitting there, completely useless.
So now, seeing Jiang He walk into his office looking exhausted from pulling an all-nighter, Yang Xu thought that the kid had finally hit a wall. He was finally needed.
'Please, just ask me a few questions! Ask me for advice!'
Jiang He shook his head. "No, Professor. I didn't run into any problems."
Yang Xu pressed, not giving up, "Really? Not a single problem? Not even a little one...?"
"Really, no."
Jiang He handed the paper to him. "I came to have you look over my article. I've already written the first draft. If you could give it a once-over for me, and if there are no problems, I'm planning to submit it to a journal on Monday."
Yang Xu froze.
"You wrote another paper?"
"Yes, it's on an early prediction model for severe acute pancreatitis (SAP)."
Yang Xu was stunned for a moment.
Then, his expression shifted to one of suspicion.
It wasn't long ago that he had earnestly tried to persuade him otherwise.
He had told Jiang He not to divide his focus on this and to just concentrate on doing a good job with the major national project.
The pathogenesis of severe acute pancreatitis is extremely complex, involving a systemic inflammatory storm that affects multiple organ systems. Trying to create an early prediction model was like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Pouring energy into it could easily end up being a sunk cost, with nothing to show for it in the end.
And the result?
How many days had it been?
One moment he was getting the ethics waiver approved to extract samples, and the next, the first draft of the paper was already on his desk?
Are you kidding me?!
Yang Xu looked at Jiang He seriously. "Jiang He, academia is not a game. You wrote a first draft in one night? Can the data even hold up? Don't get cocky just because the LNR paper went through smoothly."