The biggest failure in life is to know too much will do too little

There were always patients who happened to die in his moment of inner clarity. The resuscitation began at 3:00 a.m., and it was not yet 5:00 a.m. when death was announced to the family. The mask was removed and dawn was approaching. He walked slowly from the ICU to the office, feeling like he was stepping on top of a lake, apologizing to the sparkling ripples as he went: Excuse me. Some deaths were like the random bicycles parked downstairs that he passed by only to feel bored - if it weren't for the absurdity of life, he wouldn't have wanted to play the role of the bicycle storage warden in charge of the fees; but some deaths made him tender.

They all thought that the boy would not survive the New Year, but to their surprise, not only did he survive the New Year, but he also survived the Spring Festival, passed the first day of the year peacefully, and escaped the 15th. He remembered that on the night of New Year's Eve, he changed into a white coat in the office and buttoned it to the collar. The nurse on duty came in surprised: "Dr. Chen, why are you here?" He said without a smile, "Forced by the Spring Festival, I'd rather come to work." The girl laughed and trembled. He didn't understand why they always said, "Dr. Chen is very funny" - he was just telling the truth.

The child's bed was very close to the window. He didn't smile when he walked over, and neither did the child. The child's little face was tilted up, staring at the TV screen inside the ward as the fireworks rose outside the window. "Uncle Dr. Chen." This is how the child usually addresses him, the words are clear, do not find the five words troublesome and lengthy. He asked, "Is the TV good?" The child's miserable little face sunk in the snow of the pillow, shaking twice with extra force.

"I don't think there's much to see, either." He replied. The child smiled plaintively - terminally ill children are different, not as excited as ordinary children when adults happen to agree with them as if they had some kind of absolute approval. God has cruelly stood behind them, making them see that adults are not so powerful.

"Uncle Dr. Chen," the child gazed at him and said in a solemn tone, "my birthday is March 18. on March 18 I will be six years old."

"Then you're the same age as my daughter." He couldn't see the slight softness in his eyes as he said this, "But her birthday is in the winter, and she won't turn six until December."

"That would make her five and a half, much younger than me." The child's look was slightly dismissive.

"Okay."

"Mom said she's giving me a new game console for my sixth birthday this time." The child smiled confusedly like he was telling something that embarrassed him.

"Is that so?" -- he was already calculating how to end this conversation as soon as possible, knowing that he wasn't a particularly patient person.

"I want to play this game console." A flush spread across the child's face and he stressed again.

"You can play soon, now that your mother has promised you." He looked towards the door, the child's parents were clearly in front of the hospital bed a moment ago, how come they suddenly disappeared together for so long - these two couldn't have gone to the bathroom to have sex, could they?

"Uncle," the child took off his robot cat patterned fleece hat to reveal his bare head, his eyes looking extra large because of the lack of hair, "Mom says you're great and good at healing. I want to play that game machine, you let me live until my birthday, okay? After March 18, it will not bother you, I can die."

He knew that the child was at the moment immersed in a kind of excitement of talking to him about conditions as an equal. The child felt that he was understanding and that all his requests were very reasonable. He looked the child in the eye and finally smiled. He said, "Got it."

Then he was tempted to smoke a cigarette.

He went down to the lobby on the ground floor of the hospital. It was like a waiting room in a train station, with benches filled with various sleeping bodies sitting, lying, and slumped over. Those who were awake let their necks rise slightly to gaze, seemingly unconsciously, at the television screen hanging above their heads. When laughter rang out in the Spring Festival audience, gently followed by laughter. It may not feel funny, but when you have to tilt your head to gaze at the same thing, it is wrong to think that it is the truth.

He crossed over to them with a blank face. He walked to the outside of the hall and endured the cold. A young man wrapped in a down jacket stood under a street lamp a short distance away and looked at him, "This doctor, can I borrow a light?"

He tossed him the lighter, which the lad caught briskly, and did not reach for it as it arced back out. He watched as the lighter landed crisply on the concrete floor at his feet, then bent down to pick it up. The young man looked at him with slight consternation, shrugged his shoulders, and said, "Thank you, Doctor." With his white coat on, he just didn't feel like he could treat them as equals.

He took out his cell phone and dialed the number.

"Hello? --" On the other end of the line, the trailing voice trailed off with a kind of wholehearted seriousness.

"Hello? Hello." He smiled and said, "I'd like to speak to Miss Chen Zhizhen."

"Daddy!" Miss Chen Zhizhen cheered, then answered him again with a flourish, "I am Miss Chen Zhizhen, may I ask if you are Mr. Chen Yucheng?"

"That's right, how clever." He hurriedly spat out a mouthful of smoke that he hadn't had time to inhale, he had to answer Zhen Zhen immediately, he didn't want to delay even for a second, "Chen Zhizhen, today is New Year's Eve, are you happy?"

"Yes!" Chen Zhizhen smiled decisively.

"See the fireworks, right? Are the fireworks beautiful?"

"Beautiful!" Chen Zhizhen made up his mind to play this game to the end.

"Did you miss Daddy?"

She paused for a moment, then said proudly as if announcing the score: "No!"

"Bad girl." He finally realized how cold it was outdoors as he began to laugh with a warlike numbness at the corners of his mouth.

"Mommy's here, Daddy, do you want to talk to her?"

He quickly joined Chen Zhizhen's playbook and said, "No."

Six weeks after New Year's Eve, the child born on March 18 died. He was a few days shy of turning six years old - a piercing incompleteness that anyone reading his epitaph would find on both sides of the equation for his birth and death years.

He sat at his desk, lost in thought, and suddenly wondered if he should have told the boy's parents on that New Year's Eve that they should have bought him the game console earlier. If it was a few years ago, he would have told them, but now, he was tired of such kindness. What could be done with such a thing, other than to make those parents recall a rather humane doctor in the intervals of pain relief over the long years, and beyond that, who could be helped?

"Dr. Chen?" The head nurse pushed the door open with a smile, "I thought you were asleep, I was going to wake you up. There are still twenty minutes left before the room check starts."

"Do you still have that can of coffee there from last time?" He looked at her, the woman with the perpetually fresh expression.

"I still have it at home, I'll bring it to you tomorrow." She gingerly cleared the paper-strewn table, "I forgot, tomorrow is your day off. It's Friday, isn't that the day you pick up your daughter every week?"

"Right." He pressed his temples tiredly, "I always feel like there's something else going on today, this afternoon ......"

"Come to think of it." The head nurse had a good idea, "You have to teach that class of country doctors who came for refresher training this afternoon. I even helped you revise the PPT the day before."

"Those idiots." He let out a long sigh.

"Doctor Chen, watch your grooming." The head nurse smiled back.

"Good." He revised his wording, "That class of illiterates. An hour and a half class can drag on for four hours, and more than half of that time is spent answering those idiotic questions they have."

"Tzu said, "There is no such thing as teaching."

"I don't understand." He stood up and stretched his arms hard, carefully moving his fragile cervical vertebrae, "Are the patients under their hands a different species than our patients? Why do they all survive unharmed when they are staring at such horrible levels of doctors?"

"Not true." The head nurse answered him peacefully, "Patients they can't treat are either sent to us or sent back to die on their own - for those patients, it's probably a natural thing to wait for death, not as horrible and suffocating as it is for the city people. That's the only difference."

"Tianyang, you talk like an old man." He said softly.

"Eight years with terminally ill children is the equivalent of half a lifetime for someone on the outside." She carefully sharpened her nails with a file, "I'll tell you what, I'll change my shift at three this afternoon, if you can't make it to class, I'll go to the kindergarten for you and bring Zhen Zhen here to wait for you, like in the past, Zhen Zhen is now playing very well with two or three children in the ward."

"It's embarrassing to always bother you."

"Don't be so hypocritical," she looked at him playfully, "in fact, you think that way at all, just waiting for me to say it myself."

"Not bad for knowing each other for eight years." He laughed, "If we counted all the night shifts, I'm afraid you and I have spent more days together than many couples."

"Don't you think that's not a good thing?"

"So just make it wrong and you marry me." Once more he buttoned his white coat to the collar.

"Good." She handed him the folder with the medical records, "Honey, now we're going to check the room."

He had come to this hospital eight years ago. It was an October morning when he pinned his badge in the mirror, Dr. Chen Yu-Ching, and he said hello to himself. This was certainly not his dream. He had stood in front of the big mirror at the medical school countless times, smiling and secretly saying to himself, "Hello, Dr. Chen," when he was less than 26 years old and had already received his medical license while working on his master's thesis. He was so sure of himself that he turned down the offer from the hospital in the big coastal city. What if you can't go to America? Or, "Calm down, will you? America is hard too. He smiled noncommittally at everyone until they felt they were somehow humiliated. It was a motionless battle between the cynical, orderly, second-best world and his desperate expectations.