“Good, good. Come with me!”
Gu Yuan excitedly stood up and strode straight toward the door.
Watching the excited old man’s back, Tang Youyou opened her mouth.
She wanted to tell him that his coronary heart disease was quite serious and that he really shouldn’t get so worked up.
But then again…
She seemed to understand why he looked five or six years older than Gu Jinzhi despite actually being five years younger.
She was very familiar with this state.
It was just like her professors during university, the supervising physicians at the hospital where she interned, and those renowned TCM masters who had devoted their lives to preserving and carrying on the nation’s traditional medical heritage.
Gu Jinzhi had desperately protected Gu Yuan.
So Tang Youyou guessed that Gu Yuan had probably regarded rebuilding the Gu Medical Hall as his own responsibility.
For more than thirty years, he had carried guilt, regret, pain, and longing in his heart…
It would have been strange if he didn’t look old.
Gu Yuan led Tang Youyou directly into an examination room.
Inside, a doctor in his fifties was seeing patients. A young man around twenty years old was sitting behind him.
Both of them instinctively looked toward the door.
The young doctor suddenly stood up.
“It’s you…”
Realizing that he had reacted too dramatically again, he awkwardly called out,
“Director.”
Gu Yuan was curious.
“You two know each other?”
Tang Youyou blinked and shook her head.
“We don’t.”
The young doctor became even more embarrassed.
“Ha-ha, we don’t. It’s just… I saw you at the entrance earlier. You didn’t look well. Are you all right?”
He thought Tang Youyou had come to see a doctor.
Tang Youyou tilted her head.
She was certain she had never seen him before, but she still politely thanked him.
“Thank you. I’m fine now.”
Gu Yuan turned to the older doctor.
“Doctor Mo, this is Doctor Tang, who’s just joined us. I brought her here to observe for a while.”
Doctor Mo understood immediately.
“Perfect timing. I have a patient here. Young lady, why don’t you take a look?”
Tang Youyou smiled politely at the three men before walking over to Qian Yuming and giving him a slight nod.
Qian Yuming blushed and stood up, which immediately drew a scrutinizing look from Doctor Mo.
Tang Youyou sat down in Qian Yuming’s place and extended her hand toward the patient.
The patient hesitated and looked at Doctor Mo.
“This…”
Doctor Mo smiled reassuringly.
“It’s fine. Let her take a look first.”
The patient nervously placed her hand forward.
Tang Youyou lightly touched the woman’s wrist with her fingers while observing her complexion.
The patient was a woman in her forties. She was rather thin, with a sallow complexion and dark discoloration beneath her eyes.
She seemed extremely uncomfortable.
She was probably very itchy as well.
Several times, she instinctively tried to scratch herself, but because there were so many people around, she forced herself to stop.
She couldn’t endure the itch, yet she couldn’t scratch it either.
Her body stiffened as she shifted back and forth, trying to use the friction of her clothes to relieve the increasingly unbearable itch.
Tang Youyou gradually formed a diagnosis, but she still needed to confirm it.
When the woman finally couldn’t resist and reached down to scratch herself, Tang Youyou stopped her in time.
“Don’t move. Are you very itchy?”
The woman nodded in surprise.
Tang Youyou continued,
“Do you have a lot of rashes around your waist? They look quite frightening, and you’ve had them for several days already. The rash keeps spreading, and the itching has become unbearable. You really want to scratch it.”
“But from past experience, you know that whenever you scratch the rash until it breaks, it spreads to other parts of your body. So you’ve been forcing yourself to endure it.”
The woman’s pupils suddenly contracted.
She stared straight at Tang Youyou.
The young woman in front of her was extremely young and beautiful, looking no more than eighteen or nineteen.
When Tang Youyou had first entered, the woman had assumed that she had gotten in to see the hospital director because of some connection.
Then Doctor Mo had actually asked her to check the woman’s pulse.
At the time, the woman had been extremely irritated.
She felt terrible—so itchy that she wanted to scratch every inch of her body—and now some ignorant little girl was wasting her time.
Why should I have to put up with this?
But in those days, ordinary people still had tremendous respect for doctors.
And with the hospital director standing right there, she could only suppress her anger.
Who would have thought that in less than a minute of taking her pulse, the young girl could accurately describe all her symptoms?
The woman stiffly looked toward Doctor Mo and Doctor Qian, wondering if they had secretly told Tang Youyou everything beforehand.
But she saw the same shock in their eyes.
Could it be… this young girl really is that skilled?
Tang Youyou immediately noticed the suspicion and astonishment in the woman’s eyes.
She merely shrugged.
She had seen looks like this countless times since her third year of university, when she first began her clinical internship.
What could she do? She didn’t have gray hair or a white beard.
It was fine.
Without exception, all those doubtful looks would eventually turn into admiration.
“Can I take a look at your rash?”
The woman instinctively nodded.
Then, after realizing what she had agreed to, she hesitated and glanced at the other three people in the room.
Doctor Mo recovered from his shock.
“It’s fine. We’re all doctors here.”
The woman was simply too itchy to care anymore.
She lifted her clothes.
The moment Qian Yuming saw the rash around her waist, he sucked in a sharp breath.
There was no other reason.
There were simply too many.
He had already been shocked when he heard the patient describe her condition.
But seeing it with his own eyes made his scalp go numb.
From her lower back almost all the way to her navel, her skin was covered in dense clusters of rashes.
Many had already been scratched open, with blood and pus oozing from the wounds.
Wherever the infection spread, new rashes appeared.
Qian Yuming had no doubt that if the woman didn’t receive treatment soon, within another couple of days, the rash might spread across her entire body.
Tang Youyou frowned.
The condition was already quite serious.
She figured the woman wouldn’t have come to the hospital if the itching hadn’t become truly unbearable.
Once she had a diagnosis in mind, Tang Youyou straightened up, took some paper and a pen from the side, and began writing a prescription.
As she wrote, she said,
“It’s nothing too serious. Just ordinary shingles. Yours is a little severe, though. I’ll prescribe some medicine to make into an ointment, and I’ll also give you acupuncture. Apply the medicine every day after you go home, then come back for a follow-up in three days.”
She made such a severe rash sound so casual that half the heavy stone in the woman’s heart immediately dropped.
As for the other half…
She looked hopefully toward Doctor Mo.
Tang Youyou quickly finished writing the prescription.
She glanced at it and sighed inwardly, but her face remained cheerful as she handed it to Doctor Mo.
“Doctor Mo, please take a look.”
Doctor Mo had been curious for a long time.
To be honest, through the four traditional diagnostic methods—observation, listening and smelling, questioning, and pulse-taking—Tang Youyou had only needed observation and pulse-taking to identify all of the patient’s symptoms.
Frankly, he couldn’t do that.
And although Tang Youyou had made the symptoms sound so casual, as an experienced doctor, he naturally understood the patient’s actual condition.
If this illness became severe, it could be life-threatening.
Yet she claimed that all the patient needed was some medicine and acupuncture?
He took the prescription and looked at it.
Chinese medicines such as gentian root, scutellaria root, gardenia…
They were all ordinary traditional medicines.
Doctor Mo couldn’t help imagining what he would have prescribed himself.
Perhaps acetaminophen tablets, vitamin tablets, and similar medicines to make into an ointment…
Thinking about it carefully, their effects were actually quite similar to those of the traditional medicines listed on Tang Youyou’s prescription.
Looks like this young girl really does have genuine skill.
Tang Youyou had no idea what was going through Doctor Mo’s mind.
After he nodded and praised her prescription, she asked the woman to go into the examination cubicle.
She thought they might still want to observe the treatment, so she didn’t even draw the curtain.
She spoke gently to the woman.
“Don’t be afraid. The itching will go away soon after the acupuncture.”
The woman didn’t really believe her.
She had been tortured by the itching for so many days.
Last night, she hadn’t slept at all.
Whenever the itching flared up, she had wanted nothing more than to smash her head against the wall and die.
It wasn’t as though she hadn’t gone to the county hospital before.
But every doctor she saw had said that her condition couldn’t be cured.
Some had prescribed medicine carelessly, and after she went home and applied it, the itching only became worse.
Today, she had walked a very long way just to come to this hospital and give it one last try.
If this still didn’t work…
She might have no choice but to wait for death.