Chapter 200: A Hidden Illness

Decades ago, selfless and dedicated teachers were everywhere, and teachers commanded tremendous respect from everyone. But today, with all kinds of creative fees and hidden charges, a teacher’s reputation is getting tarnished. Some investigate their students’ parents, finding out who’s wealthy or in a position of power, then give those students special treatment.

In some schools, the mountain of miscellaneous fees makes parents question reality.

Now teachers are less focused on actually educating kids and more on making money, hitting quotas, and climbing the promotion ladder. It’s enough to make anyone worry.

Doctors aren’t even worth mentioning—bad apples are everywhere, and truly virtuous doctors are becoming rare.

Putian-style hospitals are spreading unchecked.

Hospitals have become entangled with marketing.

Some hospitals even put up jaw-dropping slogans: ‘We look forward to your next visit!’ or ‘Congratulations to XYZ department for another revenue record!’ They’re holding special meetings just to discuss how to keep patients coming back…

In the end, everyday people like us will become the true victims.

“You’ve got a thick pile of test results—is this your first hospital?”

Dr. Jia chatted casually with the family, trying to ease the mood as he began a basic physical exam on the child.

“You’re telling me. We’ve been to over twenty hospitals already. Nobody can figure out what’s wrong.”

The boy’s father answered, face drawn with worry.

“How much does he eat each day now?”

“He only eats two small bowls of rice a day. As for dishes, he likes strong flavors—anything salty or spicy, he loves it.”

The boy’s mother replied.

Usually, it would be the mom taking care of the boy most of the time.

“A seventeen-year-old should definitely be eating more than just two small bowls a day.” Dr. Jia turned to Zhou Can. “Take his temperature and pulse, get the basic numbers.”

Dr. Jia kept asking the family for details about the boy’s situation.

“Is he still having diarrhea now?”

“Yeah! Anytime he eats, he runs straight to the bathroom.”

“And this has gone on for two years now?”

“It’s been over two years already. It started in the second semester of junior high. One day, the teacher called, saying our son had lost a lot of weight very quickly and we should get him checked out. That’s when we learned he’d had diarrhea for more than a month at school—and he was eating less and less.”

The school runs a closed campus.

A lot of kids who live far away only come home once or twice a semester.

So the chance of him getting diarrhea from school food is slim. If it were the food, you’d see a whole bunch of kids sick, not just this one.

And it’s unlikely the cafeteria food has issues every single day either.

“Did he still have diarrhea after coming home and eating your cooking?”

“Still had it! The diarrhea just wouldn’t stop. At first, the anti-diarrhea medicine helped a little, but the more he took it, the more obvious his problems got. We got scared and stopped giving it to him.”

A lot of Western medicine comes with pretty harsh side effects.

Taking any single medication for too long can easily cause what’s called ‘drug-overdose syndrome.’

That’s because the body needs time to metabolize any medicine you take. There’s a cycle to it.

It might take a day, a week, or even longer.

How long it takes depends on the medication itself.

So far, there’s no drug that stays in the body forever.

That’s why most treatments require you to take meds on schedule.

With his digestive system already malfunctioning, constantly giving him anti-diarrhea medicine might help for a day or two, but over time, the old medication hasn’t cleared out before he’s dosed up again. All those compounds start building up.

Once it reaches a certain level, his body just can’t handle it.

If you stop Western medicines when side effects kick in, most symptoms clear up pretty quickly.

“Chief Jia, his blood pressure is high, his pulse is way too fast, his temperature’s normal, but he’s extremely frail. There’s also signs of rectal prolapse…”

After finishing the basic physical, Zhou Can handed the results to Dr. Jia.

Now, all pre-check records, files, and case notes are handled by Zhou Can. Dr. Jia only focuses on actual diagnosis and the big questions.

This was also meant to train Zhou Can, preparing him for the day he’d hold his own clinic.

“His high blood pressure likely ties into being extremely thin. The fast pulse—probably because his body’s working overtime. The root cause behind all his symptoms seems to go back to the diarrhea.”

Dr. Jia rattled off a series of quick assessments.

A lot of people think only heavier folks get high blood pressure, but that’s not really true.

By the book, both skinny and heavy people can get hypertension.

The root is too much blood circulating in the system.

This boy’s had diarrhea so long it’s even caused prolapse—that means this is pretty serious.

Dr. Jia went over every single test: bloodwork, ultrasound, X-ray, colonoscopy, electrolyte panels—you name it.

The doctors really tried everything to get to the root of his diarrhea.

They even tested for E. coli.

But the cause of his illness remained in the shadows; no one’s found the real culprit.

Some illnesses are especially sneaky, masters at putting up smoke screens, making it nearly impossible for doctors to pinpoint their true identity.

After inspecting all of the boy’s tests, Dr. Jia’s brow was furrowed tight.

Every test that should be done has been done.

There’s basically nothing left to try.

There are some irregularities with blood counts, but all of them seem tied to the diarrhea.

All signs point to one illness: colitis.

Colonoscopy confirms he does have colitis, but it’s definitely not the standard kind. Otherwise, every doctor before would have missed what is glaringly obvious.

Some doctors have already tried treating it as chronic colitis—with pretty underwhelming results.

Now Dr. Jia found himself stuck.

Even with all his experience, he was struggling to find the true cause.

This boy is dangerously thin. If the real cause can’t be found, just guessing at meds would basically send him straight to the ICU.

At this rate, he might end up in intensive care within a month.

“Qiu Hong, Zhou Can, come take a look at this!”

Dr. Jia, under the hopeful gaze of the family, felt a little embarrassed and called in his two assistants for help.

It eased the awkwardness in the room a bit.

Qiu Hong finished reviewing the test results and raised a few questions, but Dr. Jia shot them all down.

Zhou Can remained quiet.

He had a rule: only speak when he actually had a constructive insight.

Minutes ticked by.

The family had faced so many disappointments before that seeing Dr. Jia stumped didn’t even surprise them.

Despair crept in a little deeper.

Just then, Zhou Can heard a faint rumble from the boy’s belly. That caught his attention, so he quickly leaned over and listened close to the boy’s abdomen. (Doctors often check for wheezing or unusual lung sounds in respiratory illnesses.)

But with diarrhea, it’s rare to listen for unusual gut noises.

“Does he have these rumbling sounds in his stomach a lot?” Zhou Can asked the boy’s mother directly.

Usually the mother’s the one who pays closer attention, so she might have noticed details like this.

“Pretty often! The closer it gets to mealtime, the more his stomach rumbles—like ‘gurgle gurgle gurgle.’ After he eats, there’s another kind of sound about half an hour later—like water sloshing inside a bottle.”

This bit of information from the boy’s mother was crucial.

Zhou Can had always excelled at unorthodox thinking, preferring to tackle cases from unexpected angles.

After questioning the family, he went quiet again.

He picked up the test results once more, deep in thought.

Tagging along with Dr. Jia in gastrointestinal surgery, Zhou Can had already helped diagnose nearly ten tough cases.

Dr. Jia had called him a prodigy more than once.

Watching Zhou Can this focused, almost obsessed, Dr. Jia actually started to hope.

He waited patiently for Zhou Can to think it through.

The boy’s family was secretly baffled—why was the expert deferring to a student?

Shouldn’t it be the teacher taking the lead, not the student?

They didn’t know what Zhou Can was capable of, let alone his reputation in the gastro department.

Dr. Jia and Qiu Hong both waited patiently alongside the family. No one dared rush him.

For them, nothing mattered more than finding the root cause and curing their son. Who figured it out wasn’t important at all.

Time kept trickling by.

The family’s hope faded bit by bit.

Suddenly, Zhou Can blurted out something out of the blue.

“It’s not real colitis. It’s fake colitis!”

“What do you mean?”

The family looked at him, totally confused.

“What he means is, your son might not actually have colitis at all,” Qiu Hong chimed in.

“Fake colitis? Then what kind of illness does my son really have?”

Suddenly, the father’s eyes brightened with hope.

“When we took him to another hospital, a Dr. Qin also said something similar. He said colitis might just be a symptom, and the real cause might be something else entirely. But even after all his efforts, he couldn’t figure out what it was. This young doctor’s diagnosis matches that expert exactly. It shows he really knows his stuff.”

The father had waited so long, he’d come to doubt Tuyu Hospital’s reputation.

He could accept not finding an answer, but seeing the top specialist defer to a young doctor felt almost absurd.

The whole situation seemed ridiculous.

But when Zhou Can pointed out his son’s is actually a case of ‘fake colitis,’ the father realized this young doctor was something special.

“Chief Jia, do you think the patient might not be sick at all?”

Zhou Can’s next words were even more shocking.

If he hadn’t just correctly identified the unusual colitis, the father might’ve flipped the table in anger.

Seriously?

Who in their right mind would drag their kid through all this for no reason?

“Doctor, my son’s clearly not well—how could you say he isn’t sick?” The mother’s frustration flared.

“What I mean by ‘not sick’ is different from how you understand it. I’m saying there isn’t a physical lesion. There’s no actual bodily disease.”

Zhou Can explained again, turning to Dr. Jia.

His eyes glinted with confidence and determination, eager to get to the real truth.

“So what are you getting at?”

Dr. Jia narrowed his eyes, quickly working through Zhou Can’s implication.

Meanwhile, Qiu Hong kept her gaze fixed on Zhou Can.

She felt like she and Zhou Can were thinking on completely different planes. She didn’t even know where to begin.

The gap in ability only made her respect him even more—to the point of actual admiration.

The greater the difference, the deeper her respect.

“Would it be possible to do a 24-hour EEG on him? I suspect the real problem is a psychiatric one that’s messing up his digestive system.” Zhou Can finally shared his diagnosis.

The family didn’t understand all these medical terms, so they just watched and listened blankly.

But their eyes suddenly filled with hope.

It was like seeing a ray of light at the end of a very long, dark tunnel.

They were desperate for the excitement of finally having an answer.

“Nervous system-related digestive dysfunction? But the symptoms don’t really fit! I’ve diagnosed a bunch of these before, and I’ve never seen one quite like this.” With all his years of experience, Dr. Jia had done plenty of similar screenings.

He’d already considered illnesses like that.

“Talk me through your reasoning.”

Dr. Jia didn’t immediately agree to the EEG; he wanted to hear Zhou Can’s logic first.

He wanted to know if the diagnosis made sense.

“My reasoning is simple: I started by listening to the boy’s gut sounds, then connected the dots with all the test results, his history, and symptoms.” Zhou Can was straightforward.

“His mother said the rumbling starts right before meals, which means his digestive tract knows when the body needs food, and reacts normally. But half an hour after eating, there’s a different sound—like water sloshing—right before he runs to the bathroom.”

“I think just two tests are enough to confirm nervous system-based digestive disorder. First, the 24-hour EEG to check how brain activity changes throughout the day to get a sense of his mental state at different times. Second, listen for where exactly the gut sounds are coming from about half an hour after meals. That can help us deduce how food is moving through the colon before diarrhea hits.”

Zhou Can laid out his entire diagnostic approach.

Since his diarrhea always followed food intake, it meant waste was still liquid by the time it hit the colon.

Zhou Can’s deduction from gut sounds alone was worthy of his genius.

“Chief Jia, please let our son take those tests! We don’t care how much it costs—heck, even if it gives us no answers, we’ll never blame Dr. Zhou.”

The family quickly pleaded for the tests, trusting Zhou Can’s careful logic.

They didn’t know medicine, but his explanation made too much sense not to try.

In any case, it was worth a shot.

It’s not like an EEG is an operation—the risks are pretty much zero.

As for the money, that didn’t bother them at all.

Their biggest fear was having no hope at all.

Now that hope was in sight, what else mattered?

“Hang tight, I’ll get things set up right away!”

Having heard Zhou Can’s analysis, Dr. Jia was struck by the novelty and insight. It was a way of thinking that broke all the molds.

He was genuinely excited to see where this diagnosis would lead.

If this turned out to be neurogenic digestive disorder, it might even be worthy of a medical paper.