Although he wanted to laugh, Lin Sanqi knew that he couldn't laugh, as it would be too immoral to laugh.
So on the surface, Lin Sanqi still pretended to be unhappy and accused the Yang brothers:
"Alright, alright. We live in a modern society now. Women hold up half the sky. How can you insult female comrades so easily? Besides, a mother begging for help to keep her son alive isn't shameful; it's truly noble."
As soon as Lin Sanqi finished speaking, the local cadres and female villagers around him all applauded.
"Wang Juan, right? Where is your home? Take me there. It's getting dark soon and you don't have lights here, so I won't be able to see clearly."
When Wang Juan heard this, she pushed through the crowd excitedly:
"Comrade Lin, please, my home is right under the old locust tree. Look, it's not far away."
Lin Sanqi picked up his backpack and followed Wang Juan to Yang's house. A lot of people followed behind him.
Several soldiers from the Shaanxi Provincial Military District ran very fast and immediately began to check whether there were any suspicious people around.
Although Lin Sanqi's rank is not high enough to warrant security, Jun Wei has issued a death order that Lin Sanqi must be closely protected whenever he goes out because of his special status.
Of course, Lin Sanqi himself doesn't care. He flies military planes around all day long to make money.
This isn't America. We fight every day. What's so scary about that?
After walking for 5 minutes, Lin Sanqi finally arrived at the door of Wang's house. It was a small house with yellow mud walls and the conditions were very good.
However, these days, most of the houses of ordinary people look like this, so there is nothing particularly good or bad, and everyone is equally poor.
Lin Sanqi walked into the room. The light was not very good and he couldn't see clearly for a moment.
But you can instantly smell a distinct stench of decay, and coupled with the stuffiness of the house after being exposed to the summer sun, it is very unpleasant and a bit nauseating.
Wang Juan had already spoken at this time: "Comrade Lin, this is my youngest son. Please take a look."
After Lin Sanqi adjusted to the light, he saw a little boy about seven or eight years old lying on the broken bed. His entire left thigh and calf were all ulcerated.
Lin Sanqi took out a flashlight from his backpack, squatted on the ground, and shone it on the wound to see more clearly.
The child's entire left leg seemed to have suffered some external injury. It was now severely swollen, and a pool of thick fluid could be seen on the straw mat.
The key point is that the entire leg is wrapped in a layer of unknown Chinese herbal medicine, emitting a foul smell.
An experienced doctor can tell that the wound is in a state of suppuration and ulceration by the redness, swelling, heat and pain of the affected limb.
Lin Sanqi asked, "What kind of herbs are smeared on this?"
Yang Zhifa was worried about his son, and seeing that the senior official was willing to save his youngest son, he anxiously replied:
"It's bone-penetrating grass. I personally picked it from Mount Li. It has the effect of dispersing blood stasis, reducing swelling, detoxifying and relieving pain. This has been passed down from generation to generation."
Lin Sanqi asked again, "How did this wound happen, little boy?"
Wang Juan wiped her tears and said:
"It was all because of hunger. My youngest son was so hungry that he found a bird's nest on a tree and went to take out the eggs. He accidentally fell from the tree and the branch scratched his left leg, leaving it bleeding.
This happened 7 days ago. After I carried him home, I applied this herb to the patient, but the condition got worse.
He started having a fever four days ago, and it's so bad he's talking nonsense at night. If it goes on like this, I'm afraid he won't survive."
Lin Sanqi put on gloves and checked again and found that there was no problem with the bones, it was purely a skin infection.
However, because the infection was not promptly cleaned and treated with anti-infection drugs, it has now become "inflamed" and has evolved from a local inflammation to a systemic infection.
That is the state of sepsis, which is serious and even life-threatening.
Wang Juan said that she couldn't survive, which was entirely possible.
Lin Sanqi wondered if such a minor illness had been delayed to this extent. Could it be that the Yang family had too many children and their parents didn't take it seriously? Or was there some other difficulty?
This point must be made clear.
"Have you taken him to the village clinic? This disease isn't difficult to treat at first; it's just a minor skin abrasion."
Village Chief Yang smiled awkwardly and said:
"Commissioner Lin, there is no clinic in our village."
Lin Sanqi thought it was normal that there were no doctors in the village in the 1960s, so he asked, "What about the commune clinic?"
Village Chief Yang still shook his head: "We don't have a health center in Xinfeng Commune either."
Lin Sanqi turned around and looked at Village Chief Yang, puzzled:
"The commune is already at the township level, but there's no health center? Where do you ordinary people go to see a doctor?"
Village Chief Yang sighed and said:
"If I really need to see a doctor, I have to walk three hours to Lintong County Hospital, but our county hospital doesn't have much medicine. If I have a serious illness, I still have to go to Xi'an for treatment, but it's too far away. I need a letter of introduction from the village to go."
Lin Sanqi thought to himself, if it is true, it is understandable that the commune health center is difficult to popularize even in the capital area, let alone the Northwest.
Village Chief Yang continued to complain:
“Even if we can get to a big hospital in Xi’an, we farmers don’t have any money.
Commissioner Lin, the doctor at the county hospital actually said that a condition like ours would require penicillin to save our child's life. But penicillin is too expensive, and the county hospital doesn't have it.
The doctor also said that before liberation, a tube of penicillin cost five taels of silver in Shanghai. When it was shipped from the coast to our northwest, a tube of penicillin cost the price of a small yellow croaker.
Even so, there is still no demand for it and it is difficult to buy it. You have to find a way.
Before liberation, at least people could still spend money to buy it from foreign companies, but after liberation, there were no foreign companies or peddlers. It is said that there was not much penicillin in the entire Shaanxi Province, and only a few hospitals in Xi'an had a small reserve.
The doctor at the county hospital also said that nowadays most of the penicillin in our country is imported, and the national price is 20 cents, which doesn’t seem very expensive, but it is not available at this price.
If we can afford 10 yuan per bottle, he will try to get us a few bottles, but the quantity won't be too much.
But 10 yuan a bottle, isn't that killing us? We farmers work hard all year round, and at the end of the year we only get five or six yuan.
In other words, we couldn't afford a bottle of penicillin even after working for a year.
So now it all depends on the baby's own life. If he is strong, he can survive. If he can't survive, there is nothing we can do. People are almost starving to death, where will they get the money to treat their illnesses? "
Lin Sanqi was not surprised to hear that a tube of penicillin cost a sky-high price of 10 yuan.
You should know that in the capital area during those three years, a pound of rice could be sold for 4 or 5 yuan on the black market.
The value of a bottle of penicillin is definitely more than two kilograms of rice, so the price of 10 yuan is not outrageous, or even too expensive.
The problem is that it costs 10 yuan per bottle, and a course of treatment requires at least five or six bottles, which means 50 or 60 yuan. In the 1960s, this was unaffordable for workers, let alone farmers.
Thinking of this, Lin Sanqi silently counted the accounts again.
Over the years, he has shipped over millions of bottles of penicillin, except for the one in Yunnan, which was delivered on a designated basis.
Logically speaking, the ministry should have distributed a certain amount of penicillin based on the population ratio or the importance of provinces and cities.
Then why is Xi'an, a major northwestern city, still so short of it?
Lin Sanqi looked at Director Liu who had accompanied him to the fellow villager's home:
"Director Liu, is the penicillin supply in Shaanxi Province very tight? Or has the higher-ups not allocated it?"
Someone at Director Liu's level had naturally heard of Lin Sanqi's name and knew what he had done, so he patiently explained:
"Commissioner Lin, the Ministry of Health regularly allocates penicillin. As far as I know, 200,000 doses were shipped in last year. Commander Qi was there, too. At the time, the local authorities and the military each took 100,000 doses.
In other words, only 100,000 were allocated to our area.
100,000 doses may seem like a lot, but Commissioner Lin, we can do a simple calculation. There are 20 million people in Shaanxi Province, which means that only one penicillin dose is available for every 200 people.
If we convert it again, the dosage of penicillin is twice a day, and a patient needs two bottles a day, a course of treatment should be at least 5 days, right? That would be 10 bottles.
This is just for mild cases. If the patient is seriously ill, 400,000 units is far from enough, and 800,000 or even 1.6 million units would be needed at a time. Commissioner Lin, please do the math: 100,000 bottles of penicillin can only supply a few thousand patients.
There are 20 million ordinary people and only a few thousand quotas. This amount is simply a drop in the bucket.
Our province now has regulations that penicillin can only be used for critically ill patients and shouldn't be used lightly for mild cases. Therefore, each county has a small reserve of it, but these are life-saving drugs, and if one is used, it's gone, so we dare not release it easily."
Lin Sanqi forced himself not to say it out loud, thinking that this amount could probably only be used by leading cadres.
Keep it as a backup?
The child in the bed is almost dying from the infection. Isn't that critical enough? Why are you still refusing to take him out? (End of this chapter)
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