Part 1: A Report Written for the Doctor
Chapter One: A Sudden Encounter (1)
You never know what will happen the next second, or whom you will meet.
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Date: 2009.2.28
I was buried beneath a deskful of books and reference materials, racking my brains over the calculation of cumulative returns on stock options.
The desktop vibrated. I dug my phone out from beneath a pile of draft papers. It was my mother calling.
“Your dad’s test results are out. They’ll have to remove about two-thirds of his stomach.”
I stopped writing. “Our accounting law professor had stomach cancer and only had half removed. Teacher Lin has a stomach ulcer, and he needs two-thirds removed?”
Although my brain had already been churned into a mess by the mountain of numbers, I remained highly sensitive to this newly appeared figure.
“The surgery is scheduled for Monday. Go home tomorrow first. I’ll text you later about what you need to bring. Your dad’s workplace is sending a car Monday morning. Come with the car.”
Amid my hesitant “Oh,” Mother hung up briskly.
At the time, I was just like any fourth-year student revising a graduation thesis, bundled up in a down jacket, eyes full of grief and indignation, expression blank with bewilderment.
Teacher Lin was my father, a senior political affairs officer, an overtime addict, with a twenty-five-year history of stomach problems. During the New Year holiday, he had lost his appetite and was eating very little, so Mother had dragged him to X City for a stomach examination.
In the intermittent updates I had received before this, the news had always been that it was an eroded stomach ulcer accompanied by perforation.
People have an instinctive sense for bad things. For example, now, “two-thirds” was like a needle, suddenly slicing open all the strange things I remembered about my parents before this.
Date: 2009.3.1
When the car stopped outside the oncology hospital, I felt as though my head had been smothered beneath a glass dome.
Seven years ago, after the high school entrance examination, I was also brought here. My grandmother had been in the late stage of nasopharyngeal cancer.
My younger uncle came out to meet us and put an arm around my shoulder.
“He went into the operating room at 8. Your mom wanted to keep it from you, but I wouldn’t let her. You were going to have to know eventually. If you’re upset, you can cry now. Just don’t let your mom see you later.”
I nodded and quickly wiped away my tears with my head lowered.
The last row of the family waiting area.
I cleared my throat and set down my backpack. “Comrade, you did a pretty good job with the secrecy. How long have you been keeping me in the dark?”
I sat down and took sliced bread out of my bag.
“What are you doing?” She was clearly having a hard time accepting my calm reaction.
“I didn’t finish breakfast.” My nerves and heart had already been tempered by years of a life full of ups and downs, leaving me strong and composed.
“Want a slice?”
Mother watched my expression from the side. “You already knew.”
“If the car had stopped outside the General Hospital of the Military Region, maybe you could have fooled me a little longer.”
Mother sighed, her eyes turning red. I reached out and patted her back.
“What was it Teacher Lin used to say? Women really do tend to have poor psychological resilience. The moment something happens, they panic.”
Mother turned her face away. “You don’t know how much your dad is going to hurt with a cut like that across his stomach.”
I handed her a piece of chocolate. “You had a cut across your stomach when you gave birth to me by C-section too, and look at you now. You’re doing just fine.”
I had not even finished the two slices of bread when someone outside called, “Surgical ward, Bed 39, Lin XX!” I rushed out.
At the entrance to the operating room corridor, a doctor dressed in surgical scrubs was holding a stainless-steel bowl. “This is the part that was removed.”
Mother, who had arrived right afterward, saw what was in the bowl, let out a small “Mm,” closed her eyes, and turned away.
I carefully examined the flesh in the bowl, red with a pallid tinge, about the size of my palm, freshly cut from Teacher Lin.
Suddenly, I felt an inexplicable pang of sorrow and closeness. I leaned forward and sniffed it. There was none of the bloody smell I had imagined, only the faint scent of disinfectant.
“The tumor was located fairly high, so the resection had to be moved higher than expected. About twenty percent of the stomach was left.”
I nodded. The other person turned and went back inside.
That was my first meeting with the doctor. Forgive me for not remembering it very clearly. He was covered from head to toe.
At twelve, Teacher Lin was wheeled back to the ward. They needed to lift him onto the hospital bed, but the nurse in charge of his bedside care stopped the two of us. “We need two men to lift him. You two can’t manage it.”
Mother and I looked at each other. There were only the two of us women here. My younger uncle had hurried back because of work at his company. Where were we supposed to find two men?
The nurse looked at us helplessly. “I’ll help you with one person. You find another. Maybe the son of the patient next door or something.”
There was nothing I could do about this meticulous and fussy nurse, so I had no choice but to go out and ask for help.
At that moment, the doctor had just returned from the operating room. He had not even removed his mask and was getting ready to change clothes and go eat. As he passed the ward entrance, he happened to collide with me. He looked up at the ward number. “Bed 39. What’s wrong?”
I said, “Doctor, could I ask you to help me with something?”
The doctor said this was where the ill-fated entanglement began.
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Doctor’s handwriting: What possessed you to lean in and sniff it like that? For a moment, I almost thought you were going to poke it with your hand.
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Date: 2009.3.3
Forty-eight hours after the operation, I stayed by Teacher Lin’s side without closing my eyes. He frowned without making a sound. I could only judge his condition from the trembling of his eyelashes, until he squeezed my fingers and opened his mouth to breathe out, “It hurts.”
Once the anesthetic wore off, my heart finally settled. I kissed his forehead. “It won’t hurt for much longer.”
Our Teacher Lin was a man blessed with good fortune.
He grew up in a military compound. Although his parents were busy with work, his daily life was taken care of by orderlies, so he never had to worry about looking after himself.
Later, when he left home to study, he was quite the notable handsome fellow. Every weekend, female classmates with the hearts of wolves but the virtues of good wives would strip his sheets and bedding away to wash them, so naturally he hardly ever lifted a finger himself.
Even now, he is rather smug about this part of his history.
After he started working, he was assigned a dormitory, a small twenty-square-meter suite, with one room for two single people and one room for a whole family once someone married. In these dormitory buildings, what they never lacked were women like Big Sister Ma: talkative, but quite attentive to the daily lives of the young people. His roommate was a local, and his mother would occasionally bring food for her son to nourish him. The old lady was kindhearted. Seeing how Teacher Lin had become as skinny as a bamboo pole, she often brought extra food for him too.
Later, he fell in love with my mother.
Unfortunately for him, my mother was a clean freak who took down the curtains to wash them at least once a week. From then on, he did not even need to wash his clothes or bedding. My mother thought he never got them clean enough.
After they married, they were assigned housing in the same residential compound as my maternal grandparents. Seeing how hard the young couple worked, the older couple took over the jobs of making lunch and dinner. He and my mother only had to take turns making breakfast.
Later still, I came along. From childhood, under my mother’s comprehensive training in self-care and my blind worship of Teacher Lin, I took over tasks such as making his breakfast, matching his clothes, and even handing him a cup of tea when he wanted a drink.
From then on, Teacher Lin finally threw off the last tiny bit of worrying about anything, and he remained that way for more than twenty years.
Mother always tells me that every bit of patience she has had in this life was spent on Teacher Lin.
I say all this for one reason: Teacher Lin has been spoiled rotten by us, and we have gotten so used to spoiling him that it has become a habit…
This time, after he went under the knife, everything from the big things, like getting out of bed to walk, to the little things, like getting dressed and rinsing his mouth, was all taken care of by the two of us, mother and daughter.
My first face-to-face contact with the doctor was on the third night after Teacher Lin’s operation, when I was coaxing him to sleep.
At the time, I was half-crouched beside the bed in a twisted position that surpassed Furong Jiejie’s, with my right elbow propped on the bed as a point of support, my forearm holding up his neck and shoulders so that his head rested on my arm, while my left hand gently stroked his back.
Before this, Teacher Lin had been taken off oxygen, but still had four tubes attached to him: a gastric tube, a nasogastric feeding tube, a urinary catheter, and a drainage tube. He could turn over slightly, but the pain from the incision, combined with the bloating, kept him from sleeping properly in the middle of the night, leaving him neither fully asleep nor fully awake.
Even in this semi-conscious state, whenever I lifted his neck to massage it, he could still accurately snuggle into my arms and then fall fast asleep... I was incredibly embarrassed, incredibly relieved, and incredibly resigned to my fate.
Just as I was twisted into this rather inelegant position, the door was pushed open. During the first three days after surgery, they checked on the patients every two hours. The doctor on night duty walked in with a flashlight set to a narrow beam.
When the light revealed my position clearly, he was visibly taken aback. I felt I ought to explain, so I whispered, “His incision hurts. He can’t sleep.”
The doctor smiled with his lips pressed together. “Need any help?”
“No, thank you.”
He nodded and left.
The lighting was very dim at the time, and my thoughts were completely occupied with Teacher Lin, so the doctor left me with nothing but the impression of a tall, slender back.
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Doctor’s handwriting: You’d just asked me to help, and the moment you turned around, you forgot all about me.
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Date: 2009.3.4
On the fourth day after the operation, Teacher Lin was much more conscious. In the morning, doctors of all sizes and ranks came around on their rounds.
Chief A: “How’s he doing today?”
Me: “Other than some pain from the bloating, he’s doing pretty well.”
The chief examined the abdominal binder and incision. “The bloating is normal. He should be passing gas today. Once he does, he can start drinking water.”
He looked up and smiled at the two of us. “He’s recovering very well. You two have worked hard.”
At those words, the tall, slender doctor who had been standing beside the chief with his head lowered, taking notes, looked up and gave me a faint smile.
I didn’t know how to describe those eyes.
Clear and gentle, they suddenly reminded me of a poem I had read a long time ago: “She walks in beauty’s light, like a cloudless night sky, where the stars are shining.”
There was an expansive, tranquil world within them, one that made me almost fall straight into it.
I was dazed for 0.1 seconds, then glanced at his name badge: Gu Wei. Teacher Lin’s attending physician.
Having grown up watching Teacher Lin and a whole host of handsome men, I considered myself much more resistant to good-looking men than the average person, but even so, I couldn’t help thinking to myself, those eyes really are dangerously captivating.
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