Yan Ziruo looked at Song Yi, then at Wang Chuan, and said slowly, "During that agonizing year and three months when Feifan was in a coma, a vegetative state... if God really had a system for such exchanges, you wouldn’t be seeing the me you see today..."
After scrubbing in and changing into his surgical gown, Yan Feifan approached the operating table. To his surprise, he saw that the person lying on it was a bald foreign man with blue eyes and a high-bridged nose, who looked to be in his thirties or forties.
The man was covered with a sterile drape, obscuring his injuries.
However, Yan Feifan could see several tubes extending from the man’s body. Two of them were connected to an extracorporeal blood circulation machine.
The man also had three intravenous lines open for blood transfusion.
What’s more, Yan Feifan noticed that the floor beneath the operating table was covered in blood. There was nowhere left to stand.
He glanced at the various monitors and saw that all the vital signs displayed were at critical levels.
’Damn, this guy is one breath away from kicking the bucket.’
’Who is this person? A secret agent?’
As he speculated, Yan Feifan couldn’t help but think of the two cold, unsmiling men in suits standing guard outside the operating room.
’Put sunglasses on them, and they’d have the whole men-in-black vibe.’
’Maybe he really is a secret agent!’
Standing in a pool of blood, Yan Feifan made his secret guesses while taking the bone drill handed to him by Zhu Baoshan and getting to work.
Inside the operating room, it was just him and Zhu Baoshan.
Zhu Baoshan, in his early fifties, was currently serving as surgical assistant, nurse, and several other roles all in one.
Fortunately, the task Yan Feifan had to perform was simple: just drilling holes into the patient’s bald head.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
Yan Feifan quickly and cleanly drilled a total of seven holes.
Then, he took the long, thin Puncture Needle that Zhu Baoshan handed him.
At the first hole, Yan Feifan took a moment to aim, then plunged it in.
The twenty-something-centimeter-long Puncture Needle went straight in by more than ten centimeters.
"Hey, you..."
The sight made Zhu Baoshan cry out in horror.
Noticing the look Yan Feifan shot him, he quickly changed his tune. "Mr. Yan, please continue. Just do it your way."
"We weren’t holding out much hope anyway."
Yan Feifan continued with his work. He pulled out the stylet from the Puncture Needle, and a stream of blood shot out from its hollow tube.
This was the pooled blood from the puncture site, forced out by the excessive intracranial pressure.
Yan Feifan deftly completed the remaining six punctures one after another, draining the seven hematomas in the patient’s brain.
From the moment Yan Feifan entered the operating room to the completion of the final puncture, a total of sixteen minutes had passed.
"Dr. Zhu, in five minutes, after the patient’s brain has had a moment to recover, administer the awakening agent."
With that instruction, Yan Feifan turned and left the operating room.
As soon as he stepped out of the OR, he was met by a man in his forties with a prominent potbelly and an amiable face.
"Mr. Yan, thank you for coming all this way to perform the surgery. Someone will show you to a room to rest shortly."
After a pause, the man with the potbelly added a warning, "Mr. Yan, for confidentiality and security reasons, please tell anyone who asks that you were brought to the hospital to save a critically injured car accident victim."
"Remember this! You must remember!"
He then handed a file to Yan Feifan.
"Mr. Yan, this is the detailed injury report for the car accident patient you saved tonight..."