Path of Medicine With a System
chapter-255-30041322

Ake was transferred over to the infectious diseases department. Zhang Fan already began to prescribe treatment and ordered a quarantine without even waiting for the lab results to come out. Although typhoid fever was an illness that would display itself all over the body, it mostly spread through fecal transmission.

If this had been a Class A infectious disease like cholera or bubonic plague, then the entire area under Chasu City’s jurisdiction would have been quarantined. Even though this was only typhoid, a Class B infectious disease, this still had to be reported to the relevant higher-up bureaus.

Even though it was the Spring Festival, when the Center for Disease Control and Prevention learned of the report of typhoid, they immediately sent someone to confirm the situation. Right after that, they traveled over to the place where Ake lived! With this report of the infectious disease, the hospital leadership had to come from home as well. They had to come as this was no joking matter.

China really did control infectious diseases quite severely. Everyone would have to take responsibility. If the hospital didn’t properly quarantine the infected patient, then all of the doctors who were on duty, the department director, the vice superintendent in charge of this department, and the superintendent would be punished. A light punishment would be getting fired and losing their medical licenses. A severe punishment would be additionally getting punished with arrest and prison time!

A significant number of people who came into contact with Ake now had to be quarantined. First and foremost, Ake’s two older brothers were also quarantined. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention would deal with the remaining work in suppressing the typhoid fever. They would even be assisted by the police!

Infectious diseases were truly scary not only because they were infectious, but also because the majority of infectious diseases would have incubation periods. There were also many infected people who would have mild to no symptoms at all. It would be impossible to know that you were actually infected without a test. This all combined made infectious diseases so scary. There would be disease carriers who infected others without even knowing it!

Typhoid’s incubation period could last anywhere from three days all the way up to 60 days! Ake was now delirious due to his high fever. Zhang Fan immediately prescribed medicine for Ake as he was extremely confident in his diagnosis. He didn’t need to wait for the official lab test results to confirm it.

As for Zhang Fan’s four hepatitis B patients, the young man who was in the most severe condition suddenly vanished! He disappeared without telling anyone that he was going to leave—not even his three hospitalized girlfriends. When Zhang Fan performed morning patient checkups, he discovered that the young man was missing. The young man didn’t appear again for the entire day, or the day after that. Zhang Fan then asked the young man’s three girlfriends, but it turned out that none of the three girlfriends knew anything about the young man other than his name and cell phone number. They tried to call him, but his cell phone was turned off. It was as if he completely vanished into thin air!

The young man’s liver was already swollen. Not long after, symptoms such as abdominal dropsy, splenomegaly, and esophageal varices would soon start appearing due to his severe hepatitis B! But, what could even be done? It was impossible to find him!

Zhang Fan’s Spring Festival was really busy! This was simply the trait of the infectious diseases department. When things were slow, there would only be two or three patients, and the doctors would have lots of free time. When things were busy, even everyone in the department wouldn’t be enough, and the hospital would have to send additional personnel to support them!

Since Zhang Fan was really busy, he could only have Shao Hua’s father, Shao Hua, and Chen Qifa work together on running his hospital. Luckily, his hospital only focused on performing hand and foot limb replantation surgery, and there were only two possible results: either the limb could be reattached or it couldn’t. There wasn’t much else involved.

Starting a new year was quite difficult, as Chinese ancestors would say. That was because during this time, not only would you need to help your family to eat better food and wear newer clothes after working hard for an entire year, you would also need to calculate the past year’s expenses, which was why things were difficult.

Some people also had it hard in modern day society. When normal people were preparing for the Spring Festival, these people would hide themselves everywhere, waiting for the first day before the Spring Festival before they dared to return home for a few days. Such people were those who owed debts!

For normal debts, if the creditor was unable to collect by the time of the Spring Festival, the creditor wouldn’t normally send anyone to try and collect money during the Spring Festival. At the very least, the creditor would wait until the Spring Festival was over. This was simply a custom, an unwritten rule that was followed by legal creditors. However, there was one type of debt that was an exception: gambling debts!

China was undergoing rapid development and major urbanization. China’s government made liberal use of eminent domain, which helped many ordinary families instantly become really rich in a single night, no longer being just commoners. This wealth would come far too quickly and suddenly. Most people weren’t prepared to handle such wealth. The end result was that some people started behaving really strangely!

Obtaining several hundreds of thousands of yuan, or even several million yuan or more would suddenly make an entire family no longer need to worry about money. An entire village might suddenly become really rich instead of being just normal. These people had yet to learn how to properly manage their wealth, so some strange behaviors would occur.

They would buy cars, especially luxury cars. They would buy houses, especially large houses in the center of the city. They would buy clothes, especially international brands. Such reactions were understandable. As long as such people managed to make it past the early period of wanting to enjoy themselves and not having a sense of security, they would be able to return to leading normal lives.

However, anyone who came into contact with illegal drugs or gambling would usually end up far worse than before they got rich because of eminent domain. It would be impossible for most people to return to the normal lifestyle they had had before.

Losing everything and becoming penniless in a single night was quite a common sight among the families who made it rich from eminent domain. It would still be fine if they lost all their money, as the newfound wealth would pay for it all. However, in most such scenarios, not only did they lose all their money, they also racked up heavy debts.

China had been greatly developing the border province over the past few years. There were now many young people with name-brand items on the streets of Chasu City. They didn’t have proper jobs, yet they lived quite luxuriously, going to really expensive places and spending money as if it grew on trees. These people were relying on gambling to fund their lives of luxury.

On the 5th day of the Spring Festival, the police brought a patient named Chen Feng to Zhang Fan’s private hospital. Chen Feng’s entire left hand had been sliced off by a sharp weapon. He was a classical example of someone who instantly became rich from eminent domain. The Chinese government had paid him 3,000,000 yuan for his property. Not only did he lose all of this money through gambling in just a single month, he even now owed many high-interest loans. He tried to hide everywhere from the loan sharks, but today, they finally caught up to him.

Normal people typically wouldn’t know much about how these things worked, as normal people would know that gambling and illegal drugs were bad, so they would automatically stay away from such things.

However, over the recent years, many criminals started moving around to the areas where the government was using eminent domain. These criminals would establish illegal gambling dens there. The criminals were really clever, even to the point where the government would find it impossible to suppress them without major effort and resources.

The criminals would rent a house in a upper-class neighborhood. The rent would usually cost around 1,000 yuan per day! The gambling den would be set up in this perfectly ordinary house in a nice neighborhood. The gambling den would only operate for at most three days before it would change locations in order to avoid getting caught.

The people who came here to gamble didn’t need to bring any cash with them. The criminal organizations running the gambling dens had already done plenty of investigative work on the gamblers. The criminals were very clear on how much money the gamblers had earned from eminent domain, how valuable their assets were, and so on.

The criminals were extremely well organized. There were those who were in charge of finding new places to rent, being lookouts, handing out loans, and so on. The criminals operated on a strict system. The gamblers were all those who had recently struck it rich. They were basically nothing more than lambs to be slaughtered by the criminals.

The criminals wouldn’t even stop at taking all of the gamblers’ money that they had. The criminals would then issue high-interest loans to the gamblers, which would then ruin the gamblers’ lives completely. The criminals were vicious and willing to use any method necessary to get their money back! The normal tactic was to use intimidation. The criminals would start intimidating the gambler’s family and friends, disturbing the gambler’s daily life.

More vicious criminals would organize some people who had special diseases to come visit the gambler and ask for the owed money. The most vicious criminals would cut off your hands or feet, or even kill you, if you owed too much money!

Chen Feng had previously been a long-haul truck driver. Anyone who was capable of being a long-haul truck driver through the 1980s and 1990s in China would be no nice person. After he received his money from eminent domain, he sold off his truck and became a nouveau riche. Chen Feng was really bored every day with nothing to do since he wasn’t working anymore, so criminals successfully lured him into gambling.

Chen Feng lost all 3,000,000 yuan that he’d received, and also owed a 1,000,000 loan on top of that. He had been hiding for more than half a year now. Finally, the criminal organization’s debt collectors cornered him. Chen Feng didn’t waste any words as he picked up a knife and immediately started fighting. Although he was by himself, he managed to seriously injure many of the debt collectors. In the end, the debt collectors managed to slice off his hand. The debt collectors hadn’t expected that Chen Feng would have such a fiery temper. They were all a group of people with special illnesses, which was normal in criminal society to make it harder on the debtor’s family.

The police arrived as this was a major incident. Some managed to escape, while others were captured. Although Chen Feng had his hand sliced off, he had also seriously injured many of the debt collectors. The injured debt collectors were all brought to Chasu City Hospital.

Chen Feng had likely fought with everything he had. As just one person, he managed to injure six debt collectors. The debt collectors’ injuries were all either on the face or on the neck. Chen Feng had been aiming for fatal spots to slash at.

It was the 5th day of the Spring Festival, so most of the doctors weren’t back on duty yet. Chasu City Hospital only had one doctor on duty in the emergency department today. He became so busy from this sudden influx of patients that he felt like his back would break. Just as he was busy suturing and performing a checkup for one patient, another patient with severe blood loss was determined to have AIDS!

The AIDS debt collector patient was really skinny, just like a stick. It seemed as if even a slightly strong breeze would blow him away. He was also the one with the most severe injuries. Even his skull was showing through his knife injury on the head!

Truly, Chinese citizens should be grateful to the government for giving ordinary citizens a peaceful environment to live in. Most people could live in peace without knowing about such things. The Chinese government strongly suppressed gambling. However, many people felt that gambling was no big deal. Yet, Chen Feng’s incident was only a small example, with countless similar other stories out there. Gambling and illegal drugs really did ruin countless families.

A hospital would be a place where many incidents would occur. There would be patients with normal illnesses and special illnesses, as well as plenty of these patients who had been injured in a fight. The doctor’s job was to save all such patients, no matter what they were brought in for.

But when it came to AIDS, to be quite honest, there was still a lot of fear and prejudice. A medicine that could cure AIDS had yet to be invented. When the emergency department doctor learned that he had such an AIDS patient, his hands actually began to tremble in fear! He immediately contacted Superintendent Ouyang, who was at her own home!

“Superintendent, Superintendent! There’s an AIDS patient in the emergency department! His blood spurted onto my body!”

“Did it get into your eyes!?” Superintendent Ouyang’s voice was so sharp that it almost broke the doctor’s eardrums.

“I don’t think so. I was wearing glasses! But it got all over my body!” The emergency department doctor was so worried that he was almost about to cry!

“You’re absolutely certain?”

“I’m certain! I was wearing gloves!” The emergency department doctor began trembling all over in fear now. If it weren’t for the patient’s blood loss, which required a blood transfusion, no blood test would have been done on the patient. In that case, nobody would have even known that he had AIDS.

“I’m coming to the hospital right now. Make sure to be extremely careful! Tell the nurses as well that they absolutely must be careful!”

Was this emergency department doctor a coward? Maybe that was so!

Superintendent Ouyang arrived, but even she couldn’t do too much. She could only immediately do her best to console the emergency department doctor and the emergency department nurses. There really would be a big difference between knowing and not knowing beforehand that a patient had AIDS.

Even so, they would still have to treat the patient simply because he was a patient! He received a blood transfusion and treatment for his injuries. He was then transferred to the infectious diseases department! The patient was coughing and had a fever! He also had a lung disease!

In the early days of AIDS, it was known as a disease for the rich. It was well known now that AIDS originated from Africa. There was a certain story about AIDS in the Chinese medical field.

It was said that the members of a certain tribe in Africa liked to all live together and openly have sex. Every night with a full moon, the tribe members would all get naked and have wild sex. Not only that, they liked to use what they viewed as mystical oils.

This particular African tribe really liked to slaughter monkeys and drip monkey blood on the male members’ penises. They believed that this would have miraculous effects!

Since this tribe like to have wild and open sex with everyone, it was normal for children to be born without ever knowing who the father was. By the way, the incubation period for AIDS could really vary in length. In some people, it would be as short as one or two years. In others, AIDS might have an incubation of 10 years or even longer.

And then, one day, the rich people in Europe and America suddenly felt like adventuring in Africa. These rich Europeans and Americans felt like their lives lacked stimulation, so they wanted to have some fun in Africa. To them, black women who seemed really primitive were really stimulating and lots of fun!

Thus, the rich Europeans and Americans became infected with AIDS. After they had their fun, they returned to Europe and America and continued having fun there. AIDS thus started slowly spreading all over the entire world. In 1981, America identified its first patient of AIDS, while China reported its first ever case of AIDS in 1985.

By the year 2002, there were 70 million known AIDS patients in the entire world. The number of people known to have died of AIDS by this time was 20 million. For Asia, AIDS was especially common in southeast Asia, especially Thailand, followed by Japan!

Although AIDS technically had three different methods by which it could spread, its primary infection method was still through sexual transmission. Men, you shouldn’t just have casual sex or hook up with a prostitute just because she left a name card behind in a hotel.

You would regret it endlessly if you became infected with AIDS. Not only would you have destroyed yourself, you might even destroy your own family. The scariest part about AIDS was that there was still no cure.

And yes, while there was indeed treatment for AIDS, it was really expensive. Were you really rich? If not, then protect yourself well! This disease would be no laughing matter! AIDS wouldn’t be that far away from your life!