The caregiver was a professional in their line of work, so Ding Yun didn't need to teach her for long before she smoothly understood how to care for Liu Linxia on a daily basis.
She even learned Ding Yun's muscle massage techniques.
Within half a month, she had mastered them.
According to her, her experience and quick learning stemmed from when her mother-in-law was bedridden. The family couldn't afford a professional caregiver, so she had to quit her job and care for her mother-in-law herself for over a decade until her passing.
It was during that time that she learned massage techniques and nursing skills.
However, after spending over a decade at home, she had become largely disconnected from the outside world. Finding another job proved difficult. After some thought, she decided to become a caregiver, as she had been caring for her own mother-in-law for over ten years.
She figured she had at least a decade of work experience.
Later, she even obtained several certifications to improve her employment prospects.
It was this foundation that allowed her to so successfully learn the massage techniques Ding Yun taught her.
After making these arrangements, and with Liu Linxia's daughter's affirmation of the caregiver's nursing practices, Ding Yun finally felt at ease to enroll in university.
Upon enrollment, she immediately displayed an extremely diligent learning attitude. She paid close attention in class, spent her free time in the library researching, and utilized her student account to log into the school's internal academic forums to find neurological resources.
Her dedication and hard work in her studies led the professors and lecturers to, much like her high school teachers, constantly use Ding Yun as an example.
They urged other students to learn from Ding Yun, to be as driven and diligent as she was.
They didn't want a group of young people to be outperformed by an elderly woman.
Such efforts naturally yielded rewards. Thanks to her Life Skill System, Ding Yun's returns were even greater than what would be considered normal. Before long, her neurological specialty skill smoothly reached level five.
Furthermore, through multiple skill upgrades, she continuously purged erroneous knowledge from her mind and filled it with completely accurate information related to neurological specialties.
This resulted in a wealth of knowledge that was far more precise and comprehensive than that possessed by the current neurological medical community.
While this knowledge was still insufficient to cure her daughter quickly, it was certainly enough to write several papers.
However, medical papers, unlike humanities or theoretical physics papers, must be grounded in practice and experimental data to hold significant value, rather than pure speculation.
Even when proposing a conjecture, there must be some practical basis for it.
Therefore, even though Ding Yun had acquired new knowledge, it wasn't enough to publish papers without firsthand experimental involvement. She couldn't fabricate data to serve as theoretical evidence and write papers out of thin air.
Consequently, she didn't rush to write papers.
Instead, she began by constantly consulting professors involved in relevant experimental projects. By asking questions that were clearly beyond the scope of an ordinary undergraduate, she demonstrated her capabilities. This naturally led to her being recognized and tested by the professors, and ultimately gaining the qualification to participate in related medical research, finally entering the laboratory.
Due to her age and the fact that her displayed knowledge level far surpassed that of a typical undergraduate, Ding Yun was fortunate enough not to be relegated to menial tasks. After a brief assessment, she was immediately involved in experiments.
After half a semester, Ding Yun finally accumulated sufficient experimental time and data, successfully publishing three papers. She then used these to apply for graduation directly.
Simultaneously, she was admitted to a direct master's and doctoral program at the same university.
Following this, of course, she continued with experiments, publishing more papers, and further enhancing her proficiency.
This time, Ding Yun also didn't take an excessive amount of time.
In fact, with her newfound experience and improved permissions, by the end of the second half of the semester, she successfully published another six papers.
She then actively applied for her master's and doctoral defenses using the content of two of these six papers.
And need I say more?
Ding Yun obviously passed her defenses.
And successfully obtained her respective diplomas.
However, even with all that accomplished, and all that could be learned having been learned, her neurological specialty skill ultimately became stuck at level seven.
It would advance no further.
The path of simply learning existing knowledge and diligently improving proficiency had reached its limit.
To explore other avenues, Ding Yun politely declined the university's offer to stay on. She chose to gain practical experience by taking a position in the neurology department of a large hospital. This would not only expose her to a wider range of cases but also allow her to continue increasing her skill proficiency.
Proficiency, proficiency. Simply studying wasn't enough.
She needed to increase the frequency of using her skills, meaning diagnosing and treating patients.
Her own daughter alone wasn't enough to practice on.
However, Ding Yun's age did bring considerable advantages to her work. When groups of doctors entered patient rooms to assess their conditions, both patients and their families generally placed more trust in Ding Yun. Her older appearance conveyed experience.
Perhaps due to traditional Chinese medicine's long-standing influence, most people widely believed that there were no geniuses in medicine, but rather a skill accumulated through experience, and older age signified more experience and better technique.
Ding Yun, of course, made no attempt to explain that she had only recently graduated. She enthusiastically assisted the patients. For those she could treat with her current skill level, she provided appropriate therapies, combining medication, acupuncture, and massage.
It was fortunate that the patients and their families trusted her,
allowing her the opportunity to treat them independently.
Otherwise, she would have truly had no chance to treat neurological patients with her techniques right after joining the hospital.
Of course, besides patients' trust due to her age, her treatment methods also yielded tangible results for some, which was another reason people recognized and accepted her independent treatments.
As the first patient with less severe injuries was nearing full recovery and entering rehabilitation, Ding Yun was even happier than the patient and their family.
This was because the proficiency of her neurological specialty skill had
once again increased significantly.
It had increased once when that patient recovered.
And the increase was greater than any previous one.
This further validated one of her ideas: that the most effective way to increase skill proficiency was through usage. For medical skills, proficiency grew fastest when treating or curing patients. For culinary skills, proficiency grew fastest when cooking for others and making them feel the food was delicious.
Indeed, skills had to be used to grow.
They had to be applied to increase proficiency significantly.
Previously, lacking a medical license, the neurological specialty skill could only be improved through studying or occasionally practicing on her own daughter, yielding only minor gains. Now, she had a license and a multitude of patients.
Naturally, she could now level up quickly.