Chapter 757: [(757)] The patient is not aware Chapter 757: [(757)] The patient is not aware The ambulance stopped at the emergency department entrance, and a patient came down from the ambulance, transferring to a hospital wheelchair. It was evident the patient’s condition was not too serious.
Xie Wanying approached the patient and recognized the familiar face: yes, it was the School Beauty Li Yaxi whom Li Qi’an had mentioned.
Why was she being hospitalized again? And why had she not gone to General Surgery Department Two but instead transferred to Hepatobiliary Surgery?
“This is her medical record.” The nurse who brought in the patient handed the medical record to Xie Wanying.
Taking the medical record, Xie Wanying opened it to review the attached examination report and the doctor’s referral note.
The latest CT scan showed a problem with the patient’s pancreas.
This result made Xie Wanying blink, remembering how she had asked Li Qi’an to observe this patient more than two months ago. Perhaps, she harbored the thought of not overburdening Li Qi’an as he started learning, but why hadn’t she assigned Li Qi’an to observe another patient instead? It turned out that her intuition had anticipated the severity of this patient’s condition.
Pancreatic cancer, known as the king of cancers, is so named because it is exceedingly difficult to detect. By the time it is discovered, patients are usually in the middle to advanced stages.
Firstly, many clinical symptoms of pancreatic cancer are heavily confounded with other diseases, making it hard to distinguish.
This patient, for example, had come to General Surgery Department Two for an examination suspecting an issue with the stomach or duodenum. Symptoms of the upper digestive tract may be one of the early signs of pancreatic cancer. However, most doctors do not immediately suspect the pancreas because pancreatic cancer patients are much rarer compared to other digestive tract tumor patients. The high incidence age is around forty years old in males, and Li Yaxi did not fit these conditions at all.
When the patient was hospitalized, the doctor was not irresponsible and had ordered a full-body examination to rule out other possible diseases.
Li Yaxi had undergone routine B-ultrasounds for liver, gallbladder, and pancreas. Unlike the hepatobiliary cases, the positive detection rate of early-stage pancreatic cancer in B-ultrasound is pitifully low. Often, patients who were normal in a B-ultrasound three months prior could be near death with a pancreatic tumor three months later.
A CT scan? Unfortunately, routine CT scans are also hardly adequate for early-stage pancreatic cancer detection. It requires multiple thin-layered enhanced CT scans, and without a particularly experienced radiologist to conduct this examination for the patient, it would not be detected.
So even if the patient is now diagnosed with a pancreatic tumor, it must be because someone highly knowledgeable was involved, given that it is not yet at a late stage.
As the nurse handing over the patient was leaving, she gently squeezed Xie Wanying’s arm and gave her a meaningful glance.
Xie Wanying understood the reminder: the patient was not yet aware of her diagnosis.
A young college student, if she were to be told she had a terminal cancer, the shock would be earth-shattering, completely destroying the patient’s spirit.
Folding the medical record neatly, Xie Wanying slipped it into her white coat pocket and secured it with her stethoscope, to prevent it from accidentally falling out and being seen by the patient.
Meanwhile, an emergency nurse brought over an oxygen bag, connected it to the oxygen tube, ensuring the patient could continuously breathe in oxygen on the way to the inpatient department.
Li Yaxi, sitting in the wheelchair, was noticeably thinner than she had been more than two months ago. The medical record stated that it was this unexplained weight loss that led her to seek further examination. Initially, the probability of detecting nothing again was eighty percent. It’s unknown who guided her to get a CT scan, which allowed for the detection.
Besides, the patient’s spirits were quite good, not much changed from two months ago. She possibly assumed she was returning to the hospital for another perfunctory check-up, and her demeanor was somewhat lofty.