Blood Cancers

Xu Chen fell silent after reading it, because the diagnosis had left him completely baffled too.

The illness was too strange. Not only had it come on remarkably suddenly, but even the medication seemed to have no effect.

It was as if the condition wasn't Chronic Myeloid Leukemia at all.

But the diagnosis couldn't be lying... Every bone marrow puncture afterward had clearly demonstrated the power of science, spelling out the abnormal values. It couldn't have been a misdiagnosis.

Strange. Really strange.

"So what's the verdict, Xu?" Song Tian could tell something was wrong from Xu Chen's expression, and his voice trembled as he asked.

"I can't tell." Xu Chen couldn't very well come right out and say that his dad was beyond help, so he passed the buck. "But I know a senior who's a medical student at the research institute. He should be able to tell. If you agree, send this to me, and I'll have him look at it."

Song Tian nodded, took the phone, and sent everything to Xu Chen.

Xu Chen forwarded it straight to Ouyang Xing and asked him to see whether there was still any hope of treating the illness. That way, he could just show Song Tian the chat history.

"My senior agreed, but he'll need some time. I think, rather than waiting here to hear what someone else says, wouldn't you be better off seeing your dad yourself?"

Song Tian's eyes lit up. "Right, right, I need to see my dad."

"Let's ask the counselor for leave. I'll go with you."

The hospital was neither particularly far from the school nor particularly close, but Song Tian was anxious, so he took a taxi straight there.

They had reached their destination and were about to enter the hospital when Ouyang Xing called.

"I looked at the case you sent me and discussed it with the members of our department's support team. We found that it really wasn't in our field, but one of the graduate students on our team has a grandfather who works at that hospital. He asked, and it turned out his grandfather was in charge of your patient.

"The case is a little strange. Even the hospital's leading experts have studied it, and they formed a special team to monitor the condition closely. There really isn't much they can do. The patient's condition has progressed unusually quickly, and he's almost at the point where they'll issue a critical condition notice.

"Right now, it's like the patient with the Aspergillus flavus fungal infection we're studying. They can only try to treat him, and if they can't, collect medical information for research."

Xu Chen glanced at Song Tian, who was waiting for the elevator. He looked both anxious and worried. "That can't be right. Even if Chronic Myeloid Leukemia progresses quickly, it shouldn't put someone in critical condition within a month, should it?"

"Hard to say. They didn't give me the details, just said it was a highly unusual case..."

The elevator arrived on the ground floor just then. Xu Chen had intended to keep asking Ouyang Xing about the situation inside, but he found that the elevator was really well made—it completely killed the signal.

Still, the patient was just upstairs, and they would be there in a few minutes.

Once they reached the floor, they asked a nurse and learned the bed number. Song Tian ran to the ward, but hesitated several times before pushing the door open.

Xu Chen noticed that it seemed to be a VIP ward. The air smelled of disinfectant, and a middle-aged man lay drowsily on the bed. Beside him was a haggard, pretty woman in an office worker's uniform, gazing at the man with worry. She seemed to have come straight here after a meeting.

"Sis, how's Dad?"

"Huh? Song Tian, what are you doing here? It's not Sunday."

"Dad's in this state. How could I stay at school and focus on anything? Besides, I got leave from my counselor..."

Xu Chen paid no attention to their conversation. He had mainly come to see what was actually going on with the patient. When Song Tian went to find out more later, he could go along and have a look too, acting as Song Tian's personal consultant.

In any case, he definitely knew more than Song Tian and was better able to understand what the doctors said. He could translate it for Song Tian afterward.

The middle-aged man was lying quietly on the bed. Hearing that Song Tian had come, he weakly turned his head to look, a smile that was both reproachful and happy appearing on his face.

Song Tian brought over a chair and invited Xu Chen to sit down, while he himself moved closer to his father to listen to him speak.

Song Tian's father slowly reached out from under the covers and clasped Song Tian's hand. Then he spoke, and after only a few words, Song Tian's tears began to flow uncontrollably.

Although people couldn't share one another's feelings, Xu Chen was still a little moved at that moment.

Song Tian explained to his father why he had brought Xu Chen. His father was even more touched and pointed to the things piled on the table beside him.

There was a neat stack of various diagnostic reports, prescriptions, and medical records, along with neatly organized medication. Clearly, someone had put thought into it. Xu Chen looked at Song Tian's sister in surprise, then at the patient.

Though the patient looked haggard, he had been kept quite clean. His sister had clearly put a lot of care into looking after him; there was no doubt about that.

Xu Chen picked up the medicine boxes and looked them over: Nilotinib, Dasatinib, Bosutinib, and the third-generation drug Ponatinib. Anyone who didn't know better might have thought they were collecting tinib drugs to summon a divine dragon.

He opened the boxes and saw that some of each medicine had been taken—at least a week's worth.

It seemed these were all medicines that had been confirmed ineffective, and there was no point in taking any more.

Xu Chen was about to pick up the neatly arranged diagnostic reports when he suddenly spotted a CT scan envelope behind the bedside table. He couldn't help wondering whose CT scan it was.

"He's had a CT scan?"

Sister Song was taken aback. When she saw Xu Chen pick up the CT envelope, she looked noticeably more flustered, but after glancing at Father Song on the bed, she silently nodded.

Xu Chen couldn't help being curious. After all, a CT scan involved radiation exposure, and a large dose of radiation could also cause leukemia. A leukemia patient getting a CT scan was like stacking buffs—or rather, stacking debuffs, negative effects. It was also putting the patient through more.

But from what Xu Chen had just learned, many of the hospital's leading experts had seen the patient, and a treatment team had even been formed specifically for him. Any mistake in treatment or diagnosis would surely have been noticed, so the CT scan shouldn't have been there.

Still, Xu Chen was more interested in knowing exactly what the CT scan showed. He pulled out the film and looked at it, then froze on the spot.

He took a quick look and found the room a little dim, so he took out his phone and shone its light on the wall, using the white light reflected diffusely off the wall to examine the film.

Then he fell somewhat silent.

The film showed two severely deformed femurs with extensive bone growth, joined tightly to the pelvis and seemingly on the verge of locking together. Their density also appeared uneven. The joint areas were fragile, but the middle sections of the bones and the newly formed bone were quite hard.

Xu Chen couldn't make sense of the film or identify the disease, but he could clearly see that this was abnormal bone growth.

He looked at Father Song on the bed. Sure enough, the blanket bulged abnormally around his thighs.

This hadn't been in the message Sister Song had sent. Could it be a newly developed condition? Xu Chen hurriedly searched for information to see whether Chronic Myeloid Leukemia could cause bone growth or something similar. In the end, the answer was that both could be related to the bones, and both could be blood cancers.