This Doctor Is Too Wealthy

Truth be told, if he hadn’t been on duty at the hospital these past few days, and had he known Wu Shengnan returned to work at the Department, he would have told her not to overexert herself and would have picked her up in the evening.

As long as Wu Shengnan was by his side, he could monitor her condition constantly, and this wouldn’t have happened.

But that’s all hindsight. What’s the use of regret now? It changes nothing.

After muttering an apology to the air, Zhang Sumei couldn’t suppress her anger as she looked at Du Heng’s rigid posture. ”On TV, husbands go into the delivery room with their wives. Why aren’t you going in? Nannan only has you as family here. If you don’t go in, imagine how scared she must be right now!”

Du Heng’s heart lurched with panic at her words.

There’s certainly a lot of talk about husbands accompanying childbirth. But anyone who claims it’s beneficial is either naive or malicious. Do they have any idea how terrifying childbirth is for a woman? Do they know what a cervix dilated to ten centimeters looks like? To witness one’s wife, hair disheveled, screaming like a banshee during labor, to see the cervix dilated to ten centimeters—do they understand the kind of psychological impact that has on a man? In the aftermath, whenever the couple tries to be intimate, the horrifying image of childbirth, the shock of that ten-centimeter dilation, will relentlessly assault the man’s mind. Eventually, whether due to guilt or other reasons, the couple will divorce and go their separate ways. Eight out of ten couples can’t escape this curse.

Besides, what’s a man supposed to do in there while a woman is giving birth? Doctors and nurses handle the delivery; the woman herself does the birthing. What’s he going in for? To comfort her? Offer moral support? Forget it! Anyone who says that is undoubtedly a foolish woman who’s never given birth and likely has some other agenda. Do they even know what level-ten pain is? It’s like being cut open without anesthetic, or having ten ribs broken simultaneously. Childbirth is that level of pain. When that kind of pain hits, is a pregnant woman really in the mood to be comforted? Can she even register it? Even if she could, she wouldn’t want comfort from the one she might see as the cause of her agony. At that moment, forget comfort; just hearing him breathe might make her want to stab him eight hundred times. Comfort? The farther he stays away at a time like this, the better it is for the woman in childbirth.

To date, Du Heng had only delivered one baby. It was a difficult labor case he’d handled in a villager’s home back when he was working at the Health Clinic. Yet, that single experience, though two years past, remained vivid in his mind.

Truthfully, after the woman was discharged from the hospital, she had come with her child to thank him. However, when Du Heng saw her, he instinctively recoiled. That scene would replay unbidden in his mind, stirring an unsettling feeling towards her. Being a doctor didn’t change those feelings one bit. Ultimately, though a doctor, he was still a man—a living, breathing, psychologically sound man. If he went in with Wu Shengnan now, he wasn’t sure he could handle it.

So, for now, he had nothing to say to his sister-in-law’s words; he just lowered his head and listened to her chiding. Besides, some things just weren’t appropriate to discuss with his sister-in-law.

I’ll just bear it. At least someone’s here with me, so I won’t get too anxious, Du Heng thought.

Zhang Sumei, for her part, was using Du Heng as an outlet to vent her own nervousness. After a while, she fell silent and resumed her anxious vigil.

But this waiting was an excruciating ordeal. Time, usually so fleeting, now seemed to stretch on endlessly. Du Heng felt as if half an hour, maybe even a full hour, had passed. But when he checked the clock, only five minutes had gone by.

The scene outside the delivery room that evening was much like it was during the day; nightfall hadn’t brought any quiet. On the contrary, the steady stream of arriving expectant mothers and their families, with their anxious chatter, made the area even more clamorous. Tonight, in particular, seemed exceptionally busy and crowded, as if all the babies had decided they couldn’t wait to be born.

An hour later, Du Heng could no longer sit still. He began pacing restlessly before the delivery room door, trying to peer through its narrow, opaque gap for any sign of Wu Shengnan.

Two hours later, Du Heng was beyond tense; agitation had taken root. He knew childbirth could be a long process, sometimes lasting four or five hours, yet he couldn’t stop his escalating anxiety.

Just as he was debating whether to ask the on-duty doctor outside to check on the situation inside, that very doctor hurried over. Soon after, several more doctors and nurses strode quickly into the delivery room together.

This flurry of activity made the families waiting outside increasingly uneasy, and Du Heng, too, felt a growing sense of dread. Although Wu Shengnan was under his care, and he was intimately familiar with her physical condition—knowing it was highly unlikely anything dangerous would occur—the charged atmosphere still made him unable to suppress his worry.