Chen Chen stood in the spacious, brightly lit operating room, holding a tray of medical instruments.
As he looked at the slender back of the girl on the operating table, his expression was utterly calm.
So calm that he seemed to be looking not at a member of the opposite sex, but at an object, a farm animal, or even a corpse...
He gently caressed the girl's smooth back, then took one last look at the BIS machine.
The BIS machine showed a bispectral index that fluctuated between 50 and 55, indicating that the girl was under deep anesthesia.
After confirming there were no other problems, Chen Chen picked up a No. 10 scalpel.
A CT scan had previously confirmed the exact location of the spinal cord injury. It was at the nineteenth vertebra, where a section of spinal nerve inside the spinal canal had suffered hemorrhagic necrosis due to external pressure.
It was this tiny necrotic section that blocked signals from the brain as they traveled to the legs, leaving the girl before him confined to a wheelchair for ten years.
Fortunately, she had received attentive care. With years of auxiliary treatments, including repeated targeted epidural electrical stimulation (EES), the muscles and nerves in her legs had remained intact, showing no atrophy or necrosis.
A cross-shaped mark was centered over the girl's nineteenth vertebra. It was about one centimeter long and half a centimeter wide, precisely where Chen Chen needed to operate.
Chen Chen raised the scalpel and held it like a pen. He slowly cut along the cross-shaped mark, making an incision just deep enough to reach the dermis.
A thin trickle of blood seeped from the severed capillaries, quickly gathering into a vivid, almost eerie red against her ivory skin.
Outside the operating room, Samuel clenched his