Chapter 13
The pitter-patter of raindrops that crashed against the eaves sang throughout the night.
The summer heat that had accumulated for an entire day was washed away without a trace, and the wind sneaked in from the gap in the window, bringing a nice chill into the room.
It should be a perfect time to have a good dream.
But in the middle of the night, Liu Yan was suddenly awakened by the sound of someone throwing up in the opposite room.
She immediately rushed out of her room in a panic and hurriedly opened the next room door.
As soon as she stepped into the room, she saw Baobao lying on the edge of the bed and vomiting. Her face was white as a paper sheet.
Seeing her aunt coming in, the little girl's eyes shimmered in tears, blinked repeatedly, and the tears in the corner of her eyes fell just like the downpour outside.
"Uuuuuuuuurgghh..."
After wailing, Baobao threw up again.
Liu Yan suddenly felt her head buzzing, the shadow of her sickly sister somehow overlapped with Baobao's figure, waking up the fear buried deep in her heart.
In a rush of panic, she quickly grabbed his ID card and mobile phone, carried the little girl in her arms and rushed down.
Rummaging through the counter frantically, she grabbed some paper bags before picking up the car keys and hurriedly going to her car.
Despite feeling uncomfortable inside, Baobao didn't cry or make trouble. She just looked at her aunt pitifully with a pale face.
"Auntie, am I going to follow mom?"
"Don't talk nonsense!" Liu Yan quickly tied her to the safety seat.
The little girl hummed weakly before opening her mouth, but before she could utter any word, she had another round of vomiting.
Her stomach seemed to be empty after puking several times in her room upstairs, and now only water was coming out of her body.
Liu Yan became more and more distressed.
What happened?
Why did she suddenly get sick?
"Don't be afraid; Auntie will take you to the hospital. You'll be fine soon, you'll be fine soon..."
When Liu Yan touched the steering wheel, she realized that a layer of cold, sticky sweat had already oozed out of her palm.
She didn't even know whether those words were spoken to the little girl or to herself.
The road from the shop to the hospital was extraordinarily long that night.
Liu Yan even felt that the traffic lights along the way were conspiring against her.
She never felt so helpless and fearful, not even when she knew that she had a little time to live or when she heard about her sister's death.
When she caught a glimpse of Baobao's grimacing expression in the rear-view mirror, she felt her heart nearly crumbling.
Stomping the gas pedal hard, the car accelerated through the road at an alarming rate, blowing through several red lights in the process.
It was the first time a law-abiding citizen like Liu Yan had violated the traffic laws, but she couldn't care less about it.
The only thing on her mind right now was how to quickly bring Baobao to the hospital.
The little girl slumped weakly on the child seat, her hair wet with cold sweat, sticking to her pale cheeks.
Her eyes were half closed, and like a wilting sunflower, she huddled in the safety seat. When Liu Yan picked her up, she apologized with a weeping voice, "I'm sorry auntie, Baobao stained the chair."
Liu Yan felt like her heart was stabbed a thousand times. It was so painful she couldn't breathe.
After entering the emergency room, she looked around, and a question popped into her mind.
'Why are there so many people in the hospital in the early morning?'
A nurse quickly noticed the young lady who came in with a kid in her arms and took the initiative to help, "What's wrong with the kid?"
Liu Yan felt irritated for a moment. If she knew what happened to Baobao, did she need to be so flustered?!
But it was just a fleeting thought and she quickly adjusted her mood, then shook her head helplessly.
The nurse nodded and motioned her to follow her.
Liu Yan was like a walking corpse, mechanically and nervously following the nurse's instructions to fill in the registration form.
Not long after, a doctor in a white robe came over and carefully diagnosed the little girl.
"She suffers from acute gastroenteritis, maybe a little heatstroke." The doctor quickly wrote the medical record, glanced at Liu Yan from the top of the glasses, and found that her face was no better than the small patient in her arms. The doctor gave her words of comfort, "You don't need to be overly worried. It's quite normal for children to get sick in this kind of weather. Children generally have weak spleens and stomachs and are prone to having stomach diseases."
"Did the food cause it? I just gave her cold noodles today."
The doctor paused when he wrote in the medical record, "Cold noodles? How cold?"
Liu Yan recalled carefully, "The kind that is not hot."
She didn't dare give the little girl food that was too cold in fear of something like this happening. She just ran the noodles under the cold water once and that was it.
The doctor smiled and said, "It's okay. The main reason is that the little girl's digestive function is not very good. Recently, it's been hot and rainy, and it's a little heatstroke. It's cold and painful tonight. When it got cold, the heat and cold came back all of a sudden.
Eat something light and easy to digest for the next few days, and not greasy for 24 hours.
In addition, there has been a lot of rain recently and the temperature difference is large, so be careful not to freeze your child's stomach."
After listening to the diagnosis, Liu Yan finally let out a sigh of relief.
She had taken care of many children in orphanages, many of whom had been sick, but she had never been so flustered as she was currently.
Perhaps, this was what it meant to be "blood is thicker than water."
The number of nighttime emergency departments in paediatric hospitals exceeded her expectations.
Liu Yan took Baobao to pay the bill first, and then came to the infusion hall all the way to inquire.
Along the way, she saw all the joys and sorrows of life.
This place was a maternity and child health care hospital. There were both newly born babies and children who were suffering from severe illness...
Ecstasy, despair; joy, sadness...
The two extreme emotions on the opposite spectrum were intertwined, like a thick cloud.
Under the exposure to so many high-intensity feelings at one time, Liu Yan suffocated for a moment.
Out of habit, she instinctively stretched her hands and opened and closed her palm repeatedly to collect a lot of emotional fruits.
The dark despair, the pure white newborn, fell into her palm with clear boundaries, but there seemed to be interrelation between them, just like the dualities of yin and yang.
So shocking.
A flash of inspiration surged in her mind. She decided to use the newly obtained fruits to brew a special wine, which she would name Life and Death.