Chapter One: A Sudden Encounter (4)
Several family members who had been watching saw that things had turned physical and hurried forward to restrain the out-of-control relatives.
“How can you hit people?!” Xiao Du shouted angrily.
“My dad is dead!” a woman screamed as she rushed over.
I didn’t react in time. Although I turned my face away, she still shoved me hard in the neck.
The doctor grabbed my arm, pulled me behind him, and stepped in front of me, blocking the woman’s hand as she tried to shove me again.
“This is a hospital! Don’t cause a scene!”
After that came a brief period of chaos. Within my field of vision, there was only the white coat standing in front of me, until the security guards arrived after hearing the commotion and brought the situation under control. Ten minutes later, a local police officer arrived as well.
“You killed someone and then assaulted people!” the deceased man’s eldest son grabbed the police officer’s arm.
“You were the ones who started it!” Xiao Du rubbed his arm, his face red with anger.
“There are surveillance cameras in the corridor. We can pull the footage and see who started the violence.”
Doctor Gu turned his head toward me and suddenly lifted a hand, tapping my chin.
“Ah...”
Only then did I realize that there was a cut on my chin, and it was bleeding.
Both the medical staff and the patient’s family, along with the local police officer, went to the office. The onlookers gradually dispersed.
I returned to the ward, soothed Teacher Lin, who had been woken by the commotion, then sat on the bed hugging the quilt and staring blankly into space.
About half an hour later, the ward door was gently pushed open. Doctor Gu stood in the doorway.
I glanced at the sleeping Teacher Lin and walked outside.
“Your chin.”
Doctor Gu handed me a bandage.
“Thank you.”
I took it and tore it open, only to discover that there wasn’t a mirror anywhere in the corridor.
The doctor sighed softly and took the bandage from me.
“Lift your head a little.”
I stood stiffly.
Being this close suddenly felt a little awkward. In the middle of the night, a man and a woman alone together...
I touched the bandage he had applied and cleared my throat.
“Is everything taken care of?”
“Mm.”
His brows were slightly furrowed as he looked toward the door of the ICU. He was silent for a long time before finally speaking in a low voice.
“The first patient I’ve lost under my care.”
A lot of people think that doctors have grown accustomed to life and death. No one can possibly remain unmoved by the loss of a life. Yet when we see someone suffering from a terminal illness, our first reaction is compassion. A doctor’s first reaction, however, is whether the person can still be saved, and how to save them.
I looked toward the ICU, which had already been cleaned up.
“My great-uncle is a traditional Chinese medicine doctor. He once said that when you can save someone, doing your best is fulfilling your duty. When you can’t save them, doing your best is still fulfilling your duty.”
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Doctor’s handwriting: You’re a girl. Don’t be so foolishly reckless and rush forward like that again. But that night, I really did come to understand a few things.
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Date: 2009.3.15
The ward was unusually quiet today. Groups of two or three patients gathered together, speaking in low voices about the chaos that had happened in the early hours of the morning.
I went to the hot-water room to get some water. Xiao Du was scrubbing a towel. He turned his head when he saw me.
“Jie, are you about to be disfigured?”
I couldn’t laugh or cry. “There wasn’t poison under her fingernails.”
“Tsk. It’s fine. If you do get disfigured, let Doctor Gu take responsibility.”
When Xiao Du was eleven, his parents divorced and he was assigned to live with his mother. When he was thirteen, his mother remarried and moved to another part of the country, leaving him with his maternal grandparents.
His grandfather’s retirement pension wasn’t much, while his grandmother worked as an hourly cleaner at the hospital to supplement the household income. Xiao Du’s mischievous nature never affected how much the elderly couple doted on him. And so the little rascal ran wild without restraint until he turned eighteen.
Then his grandmother died of a cerebral hemorrhage.
At the time, he had just learned that his gaokao results were terrible.
After the funeral, he came to the hospital to sort through her belongings. A nurse who knew him asked, “Xiao Du, what are you planning to do next?”
“Find a job! Make money!”
At eighteen, he was young and reckless, convinced that the world was vast and that wherever he went, he could dig up gold.
“Going to school is your best way of making money.”
A voice, neither warm nor cold.
“Cut it out. So what if you have a PhD?”
Xiao Du knew this person. His grandmother had often mentioned him whenever she came home.
“At least you’ll know how to perform first aid for a cerebral hemorrhage, as well as how to provide daily care.”
Xiao Du’s grandmother had died so suddenly that she hadn’t even had time to leave any instructions. All that remained were his grandfather, whose health was not particularly good, and himself.
“You still have your grandfather. If I were you, I’d go to school.”
The man calmly pulled a medical chart from the nurses’ station and left.
Faced with this man ten years his senior, Xiao Du discovered that he had absolutely no argument with which to fight back.
No one knew what happened between the two of them afterward. All anyone knew was that not long after, Xiao Du took over his grandmother’s position. Every morning and evening at six, he came to clean the ward, and on weekends he stayed in the ward all day to help out. He earned a little supplementary income while retaking the gaokao.
He had never been a bad-natured child to begin with. Once he understood the reasoning behind things, he naturally became more sensible.
All of this was something the head nurse mentioned casually while chatting.
“Gu Wei certainly managed to set him straight. Even now, Xiao Du will occasionally go to him with questions.”
At the time, I even wondered, do people still remember what they learned in high school after N years have passed since the gaokao?
“Of course I remember.” Two hours later, Xiao Du waved the physics test paper in his hand at me as I recited from my book on the balcony. “Jie, you studied physics, didn’t you?”
A drop of sweat slid down my face. I crouched there awkwardly against the balcony railing, drawing a force decomposition diagram while inwardly cursing, Doctor Gu, you’re really something! You’ve been using your high school biology all along, but how many years has it been since I last touched high school physics?
Date: 2009.3.16
At 7:20, when Doctor Gu appeared in the office right on time, I was actually a little surprised. I hadn’t seen him at all yesterday, and I had assumed that, like in those TV dramas, after the dispute the night before, he would have been sent home to “face the wall and reflect on his mistakes”… TV dramas really are all lies!
At 8:00, doctors of all ranks came by on rounds, and Teacher Lin could have his stitches removed. As we left the ward, Doctor Gu stayed behind at the very end, turned back to look at me, and gave me a nod.
My mother, beside me, shot me a sharp glance. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” I couldn’t exactly tell you that he was looking to see whether my face had been disfigured.
At eleven, Doctor Gu pushed the door open with a stainless-steel bowl in his hands. “Bed 39, time to remove your stitches.”
Ever since I was little, I had heard Grandma say that everyone had a marriage thread tied around their fingers, so I liked observing men’s hands more than their faces. And these hands in front of me happened to fit my aesthetic preferences perfectly: clean, slender, with clearly defined knuckles. Tweezers in his left hand, scissors in his right, he deftly lifted, snipped, and pulled them out. In less than two minutes, half the stitches were gone. “We’ll remove half today and half tomorrow.”
“Once they’re all removed, I can go home.” Teacher Lin was very excited.
“You miss home that much?”
“I’ll come see you in the future.”
I was sweating bullets on the side. Teacher Lin, that’s really not something you should say…
Doctor Gu pressed his lips together in a smile as he tidied up. “I, on the other hand, hope you’ll never need to come looking for me again. But your wife just signed the paperwork for postoperative chemotherapy. You’ll be back in twenty-one days.”
As they were talking, Xiao Du poked his head around the doorway. When I saw the book in his hand, I headed toward the door, while the doctor on the other side also nodded goodbye and walked over. Xiao Du saw the two of us heading toward him at the same time. “Huh? Huh? Why don’t you two team up and open a tutoring class?”
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Doctor’s handwriting: It wasn’t me who sold you out. It was the head nurse.
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Date: 2009.3.17
After lunch, on my way back, I saw several patients’ family members stopping Doctor Gu in the hallway.
“Doctor Gu, could you give me some contact information?”
“The head nurse has the duty numbers for the office and nurses’ station.”
“What about your personal contact information?”
“Our personal contact information isn’t made available to the public.”
“Doctor, just leave one with me. I won’t give it to anyone else.”
“I’m sorry, but my private number really isn’t convenient.”
When I returned to the ward, Teacher Lin was just about to leave.
“Where are you going?”
“To ask the doctor for his contact information.”
I raised the slip of paper in my hand. “The duty number? I already got it from the head nurse.”
Teacher Lin ignored me completely. “My fellow patient said the duty number is too busy. I’m going to ask the doctor for his.”
“They won’t give you—” yours. He was already long gone…
Ten minutes later, I came back out after washing some fruit, and Teacher Lin was already reclining on the bed listening to the radio.
“You got it?” I asked casually.
“Mm.”
I turned my head stiffly. “Whose?”
Teacher Lin leisurely ate his grapes. “Doctor Gu’s.”
In the afternoon, Doctor Gu came to remove the remaining half of the stitches. I tried hard to read something unusual on his face, but unfortunately, he remained completely calm.
Teacher Lin was in quite a good mood and chatted with him. “At this speed, you’re really skilled at removing them.”
After finishing, Doctor Gu straightened up and smiled. “I’m the one who stitched them.”
I stepped forward with paper and pen. “Doctor Gu, what do I need to pay attention to after going home? Is it convenient to shower with the incision? Are there any foods I need to avoid? Is the full blood chemistry panel every three days or every other three days…”
The doctor answered each question one by one. As he watched me scribble everything down, he kept up a pleasant interaction with my mother. Once I finished writing, he politely nodded goodbye to us. There was nothing unusual about him at all. I looked at the notebook in my hands. Could it be that I was overthinking things?
Date: 2009.3.18
After rounds that morning, I couldn’t find Doctor Gu anywhere. Without the physician in charge of the bed signing the discharge notice, we couldn’t complete the discharge procedures.
“He has two surgeries this morning.” The head nurse checked the surgical schedule. “The first is at eight, the second at ten-thirty. Wait until he comes to work this afternoon.”
At 10:15, while I was packing our luggage, someone knocked on the ward door. There he was again in surgical scrubs, with only a pair of eyes showing. He held a medical chart folder and pulled out a signed discharge notice.
“Don’t you have surgery?”
“There’s a twenty-minute gap in between.”
I looked at him, suddenly not knowing what to say.
“Go take care of the paperwork quickly. Otherwise, forget about going home today.”
He came and went in a hurry.
Collecting the medicine, photocopying the medical records, swiping the card, getting the inter-hospital transfer certificate…
At one in the afternoon, the car drove away from the hospital. Almost instinctively, I turned back to glance at the inpatient building, my heart filled with an emotion I couldn’t quite put into words.