This Doctor Is Too Wealthy

After the doctor at the window finished speaking, he looked as if he was about to disappear again immediately. Du Heng didn’t waste any more time, promptly stepping forward to explain his visit.

”Hello, my name is Du Heng. Director Mei Dong from your hospital asked me to come.”

The doctor at the window looked at Du Heng in confusion. ”Well then, you should call our Director.”

Du Heng explained, ”This place wasn’t hard to find, and you all seemed very busy, so I decided to just come up myself.”

”You’re a family member of a patient, right? Please wait here for a moment. I’ll go get our Director.”

”Okay, thank you.”

Du Heng stood at the door to wait, but this wait ended up lasting nearly half an hour.

Du Heng was taken aback. It seems I’ve done something foolish, he thought. He had no choice but to find the phone number Director Zheng had given him and make the call.

The call connected quickly, and someone came out just as quickly.

”Hello, Doctor Du. You should have called in advance; I would have come down to meet you.” Mei Dong appeared in the passageway, smiling warmly as he greeted Du Heng.

Mei Dong was courteous, and Du Heng naturally reciprocated. After shaking hands, he said, ”Director Mei, you all seem very busy, so I came up myself.”

”Please come inside. Let’s talk in my office.”

Mei Dong politely ushered Du Heng into the passageway, then led him around the perimeter of the ward.

It was only then that Du Heng discovered the entire Neonatal Intensive Care Unit was actually one level further inside. The corridor they were currently walking through was separated from it by a wall of floor-to-ceiling glass.

From this corridor, most of the ward’s conditions could be clearly seen.

And at this time, the ward was bustling, chaotic, and equally noisy.

Nurses hurried back and forth ceaselessly, babies wailed loudly, machines beeped, hummed, and roared, and in several places, doctors were gathered around pediatric patients, performing treatments in an orderly manner.

Mei Dong noticed Du Heng’s gaze and said as he led the way, ”This is our daily routine. When we sleep at night, these sounds are still echoing in our minds. Many of our colleagues are suffering from neurasthenia.”

Mei Dong suddenly gave a self-deprecating laugh. ”Many family members might say our fees are expensive, but they truly haven’t seen our hardships. To put it a bit sentimentally, the doctors and nurses working in this ward even have to run to the toilet.”

Du Heng kept observing the scenes in the ward. Hearing Mei Dong’s self-deprecating words, he said softly, ”Seeing this situation, I both envy and sympathize with all of you.”

”How so?”

”I envy that you have so many patients and so many excellent doctors and nurses. Although it may seem a bit overwhelming, the pay and skills acquired are excellent. Moreover, it must be easy to find professional fulfillment and a sense of superiority here.

”I sympathize because, despite the high wages, you don’t have time to spend them. Also, are most of the young doctors and nurses in this ward single?”

Hearing Du Heng’s words, spoken with a hint of teasing, Mei Dong gave a bitter smile. ”They say a pediatrician’s job is so undesirable that not even a pig or dog would want it. In the medical hierarchy, pediatricians rank lower than emergency doctors, let alone the medical staff in our Pediatric Intensive Care Unit.”

Mei Dong pointed at the people inside. ”Many people who come here probably can’t even last a month before they leave. We go through great difficulty to retain some and train them, only for the situation you mentioned, President Du, to occur.

”They can’t find partners, or if they have one, the relationship fails. Then, one by one, they all transfer out or resign directly. Sigh, it’s tough!”

Du Heng nodded with a sense of shared understanding.

Seeing this scene, if he were to ask the doctors from the Pediatrics Department of his Municipal Maternal and Child Health Hospital to come here, forget one month—if they could manage to work for three days without running off, Du Heng would feel they had brought him great honor.

This topic was a bit heavy, so Du Heng pointed at the beds in the ward and asked, ”Are the beds in the ward in tight supply?”

Mei Dong glanced in the direction Du Heng was pointing. ”Children from the entire province are sent here, and children from neighboring provinces are also sent over from time to time. How could the beds here not be in tight supply?

”What we’re seeing now is three pediatric patients to one crib. These are all children who are already in the observation or recovery period. At this stage, they will be observed here for two to three days at most. If their condition stabilizes, they will be immediately sent out. We must make space for the more critically ill children who come later.

”Over in the resuscitation and treatment rooms, the situation is slightly better. Some children can have an entire crib to themselves, but most are still two children sharing one crib.”

Hearing about this number of patients, Du Heng’s envy wasn’t just verbal; he was truly envious from the bottom of his heart. If I had this many patients, I could definitely train many excellent doctors. After all, being a doctor is a profession where practical ability is more important than theoretical knowledge. Without a large patient base as a foundation, even if you brought in a Ph.D., they’d become useless within two years if they didn’t get hands-on practice.

Envious and not knowing what to say, Du Heng could only continuously look at the babies and cribs in the ward.

Of course, to be precise, those can’t really be called cribs, he thought.

This ward must have been designed to fully utilize space, allowing for as much machinery and equipment as possible while giving medical staff room to maneuver. They didn’t place the kind of large hospital beds found in ordinary hospital rooms.

The beds used for the babies inside were like the medicine carts used by nurses in ordinary wards—those eighty centimeters long and fifty centimeters wide—with added guardrails.