After being separated from my family, I became a darling of the military region thanks to my medical

The second phone call came immediately afterward.

Zhao Lanlan put down her pen and reached for the receiver.

"Hello comrade! I'm calling from Fengtian. I finally got through!" The man on the other end spoke in standard Northern Mandarin, with a loud and clear voice and a fast pace.

Lin Wan was suddenly overjoyed.

I understand! I understand everything this time!

She gripped the pen tightly, sprang up from the folding chair, and snatched the phone away before Zhao Lanlan could speak.

"I'll pick you up this time!"

Lin Wan straightened her back, held the receiver firmly to her ear, and cleared her throat. She subconsciously glanced at Zhao Lanlan out of the corner of her eye—the other woman withdrew her hand, expressionless, simply placed the red pen on the registration form, and leaned back in her chair.

Lin Wan turned her gaze away and adopted the gentle voice she had honed while entertaining guests in the Lin family's living room.

"Hello, this is the China Heart Emergency Hotline. Please don't panic, tell me slowly, how old is your child? What illness does he/she have?"

After saying that, she felt quite satisfied. Composed, considerate, and professional—she had it all.

"My child is one and a half years old! I read in the newspaper that my baby's lips aren't turning purple, but he sweats profusely and breathes very rapidly while breastfeeding! The doctor at the county hospital said he heard something... a systolic murmur, and the ECG showed left ventricular hypertrophy! Is this really the Tetralogy of Fallot you've been talking about? Should we buy a hard-seat train ticket to Beicheng immediately for surgery?"

The barrage of words came like a machine gun, and even the man's perfect Mandarin couldn't withstand the sheer volume of information. Lin Wan's smile gradually froze.

The lips are not turning purple?

Left ventricular hypertrophy?

Systolic murmur?

She recognized each word individually. But when they were mixed together, her mind was a chaotic mess, like a wheat field swept by a tornado, unable to grasp a single ear of wheat.

The more than twenty-page triage manual was lying in the drawer beside me. Zhao Lanlan had even circled the key points on it with a red pen, and specifically instructed me to memorize the entire section on "Common Manifestations of Non-cyanotic Congenital Heart Disease".

She flipped it over, glanced at it, and then, feeling it was too far removed from her own life, closed it and stuffed it back into the bottom of the drawer.

"Um... comrade, please don't rush..."

Lin Wan's voice began to waver. She held a ballpoint pen and scribbled a circle and then a line on the white paper in front of her, as if searching for some life-saving clue.

"The child's skin isn't turning purple... so maybe it's not?"

As soon as she said those words, she felt guilty.

"What do you mean 'maybe'! The doctor said there are heart diseases that don't turn purple! How serious is left ventricular hypertrophy? Can we delay treatment?" The family member on the other end raised their voice eight octaves, their anxiety barely contained.

"I...I need to ask the doctor." Fine beads of sweat appeared on Lin Wan's forehead, her fingers gripping the pen so tightly they cracked. "Where is the left ventricle...again?"

She regretted it as soon as she said it.

There was a moment of silence on the other end of the phone. That second was more unbearable than all the previous noise.

"Aren't you a hotline worker? How come you know nothing about this?! This is a matter of life and death, do you even know anything about treating a patient?!"

The angry shouts of the family members poured out of the receiver, echoing in the small office. Gu Yue stopped opening the letter and turned to look at Lin Wan.

Lin Wan's face flushed red from the yelling, her lips moved a few times, but she couldn't utter a single word. Her hand holding the receiver trembled, and her other hand instinctively reached for the cover of the triage booklet on the table, but her fingertips just touched the pages before she pulled back—flipping through the book now? Could the person on the other end of the phone wait?

Just as she stood frozen in place, unable to move forward or backward, a hand reached out from the side.

"Give me."

Zhao Lanlan didn't even spare a glance for Lin Wan.

Lin Wan handed the receiver over. Her palms were sweaty, and when her fingertips touched Zhao Lanlan's dry hand, the temperature difference was so obvious that even she was taken aback.

Zhao Lanlan took the receiver and held it to her ear.

She didn't rush to speak.

The only sounds in the office were the heavy breathing coming from the telephone line and the gentle scraping of poplar branches against the glass in the wind. Zhao Lanlan squinted, silently tapping her left index finger three times on the desk.

Then she spoke. Her voice was soft, her pace steady, and each word was enunciated clearly.

"Hello comrade, that was the new intern clerk, she's not very familiar with the work yet. I heard your child's condition clearly—no cyanosis, left ventricular hypertrophy, accompanied by a systolic murmur, plus sweating and difficulty breathing while feeding. The preliminary judgment is not tetralogy of Fallot, but most likely a ventricular septal defect complicated by heart failure."

The heavy breathing on the other end of the phone suddenly stopped.

After a few seconds of silence, the man's voice rang out again, as if he had been pulled from the water, gripping the rope on the shore with all his might: "Yes, yes, yes! The doctor seemed to have mentioned the term 'ventricular septal defect'! So what do we do now? Can we come to Beicheng? My wife said she'll buy train tickets tonight..."

"You can't take the train." Zhao Lanlan interrupted him, glancing at the quick reference sheet that she had taped firmly to the corner of the table.

"An infant with heart failure already has a heavy burden on their heart. The fastest train from Fengtian to Beicheng takes more than 20 hours. The carriages are crowded, the air is not circulating, and the temperature is unstable. A one-and-a-half-year-old child might not be able to withstand the bumpy ride and lack of oxygen."

Her tone was unwavering, and she broke down her words into clear and concise sections.

"The first thing you should do now is take your child to a major hospital in the city and find a pediatrician to correct the heart failure, make sure the breathing isn't so rapid and the child isn't sweating so much while breastfeeding. Once the condition is stable, bring all the test results to Beicheng."

"I've got it, I've got it! Correct the heart failure first!" the man repeated incoherently on the other end of the line, as if afraid of missing a single word. "I'm going right now! I'll borrow a cart and go to the city immediately! Thank you, doctor! Thank you, doctor!"

"I'm not a doctor," Zhao Lanlan said.

But the other end had already hung up. A busy tone echoed in the receiver.

Zhao Lanlan put down the phone and finished filling in the last line of the registration form: Fengtian, male, one and a half years old, ventricular septal defect suspected of being complicated with heart failure, non-cyanotic type. In the emergency level column, she wrote a "B" in red pen and noted next to it "arrange transfer after heart failure is corrected, and reconnection is expected in one week".

The office remained quiet for a long time.

The shadows of the poplar trees outside the window were reflected on the wall, swaying in the wind.

Lin Wan sat in the folding chair, leaning back. The ballpoint pen in her hand didn't write a single word on the paper from beginning to end. She unconsciously unscrewed and re-capped the pen, making a soft clicking sound.

Sunlight streamed in through the window, illuminating Zhao Lanlan's hands, which lay open on the table. The curve of her knuckles was particularly striking in the light.

These same hands, just over ten minutes ago, caught the wailing of a mother from the mountains of Sichuan, and now they've stopped a reckless father from Northeast China. Her hands can't lift more than five pounds, can't unscrew a can lid, but she can hold a pen, steady the telephone dial, and catch all the panic and despair coming from the other end of the phone line.

In contrast, Lin Wan looked at her fair, soft, and neatly trimmed hands and felt a sense of absurd irony.

In this office, where one could seemingly simply sit and answer phones, register names, and collect a salary without lifting a finger, there was no sycophancy from superiors, no vain competition within the compound. Instead, there were letters laden with blood and tears, and long-distance phone calls that concerned life and death.

On this early spring morning, Lin Wan, having been slapped hard by reality, finally realized that Ye Zhen's seemingly casual arrangement was not a compromise or a handout at all. This inconspicuous, secure job, without real skills or reverence for life, could truly strip away the skin of the ignorant and incompetent.