Chapter 99: Trouble at the Hospital

Zeng Yingying startled and quickly took the gurney handed over by her colleague. Once again, with everyone helping, they lifted the man onto it.

Meng Qiaoyuan looked at the frightened man before her, his face gone a little pale, and said flatly, “Go pay the fees. What are you standing there for?”

“Ah! Oh, oh, right! I’ll go right now! Doctor, what happened to my brother?”

The haze of alcohol had completely left him. The man he had been drinking with a moment ago had been taken away on a stretcher, and the shock had left him unable to react at once.

Meng Qiaoyuan said, “I can’t make a diagnosis without imaging. For now, it looks like a mild concussion. Go pay first. We’ll talk about the rest once the results are back.”

The man hurried off to the payment desk.

At that moment, Meng Qiaoyuan did not yet know what kind of storm this ordinary patient would bring.

After a full night of nonstop work, Meng Qiaoyuan, finally off duty, sat in her car and could not fight off her exhaustion. She reclined the seat and drifted into sleep.

She did not wake until a violent impact jolted her awake. When she opened her eyes, Shen Mushi was outside the window, pounding on the glass like a madman.

Still blank with confusion, she pushed open the car door, only to have a furious voice crash down over her head.

“Are you trying to die? Don’t you have a shred of common sense? It’s the dead of winter and you dare sleep in a car with the doors closed? If you’re that tired, why didn’t you call a ride service?”

Meng Qiaoyuan took a moment to register it, her mind still sunk in the dregs of sleep. Expressionless, she nodded and said, “Thank you.”

“…”

Shen Mushi was nearly driven to laugh in exasperation.

He had only come to the car to fetch a power bank. Who knew that when he saw Meng Qiaoyuan lying there with her eyes shut, he had nearly lost his soul.

And this was all he got in return—a cool little “thank you”?

He should be the one thanking her.

He did not even need coffee anymore. His adrenaline shot through the ceiling, enough to keep him alert all morning.

Shen Mushi trembled with anger he could not quite control. He pulled Meng Qiaoyuan out of the car and shoved her into the passenger seat, then slipped into the driver’s seat himself.

“I’ll take you home. Don’t drive these next two days. Either take a taxi or call me and I’ll come get you.”

Meng Qiaoyuan yawned. “It’s fine. I’ll take a taxi. You do your thing.”

Shen Mushi was speechless.

Sitting in the passenger seat, Meng Qiaoyuan gradually woke up. She did not think she had been in any real danger. She had not been sleeping deeply, and her phone had an alarm set; a few minutes’ rest would not have caused any trouble.

But looking at Shen Mushi’s distinctly pale face, she decided it was best not to say anything foolish and risk giving him myocarditis out of sheer anger.

When they reached the bottom of Meng Qiaoyuan’s apartment building, Shen Mushi tossed the car key back into her lap. “I ordered you some takeout. It’ll be there soon. Eat before you sleep. I’m heading back to work. Call me if anything comes up.”

Seeing his expression was not exactly pleasant, Meng Qiaoyuan hurriedly nodded like a woodpecker pecking grain. She watched the tall doctor depart.

The next day, Meng Qiaoyuan was back at work in the outpatient clinic. After the busiest stretch of the morning had finally passed and she had just managed to catch a breath, a group of people forced their way in through an opening.

“It’s her! I remember her name! It’s that woman with the surname Meng!”

The voice sounded vaguely familiar. The young woman at the triage desk by the door could not stop them, and the group pushed in all the same.

Meng Qiaoyuan did not stand. She only lifted her head to look at the troublemakers.

At the front was the only healthy man from yesterday’s drunken trio.

His eyes were ringed with dark bruises, clearly showing that someone had beaten him.

The intern beside her looked flustered, but since he was a man, he stood in front of Meng Qiaoyuan’s desk and became the last line of defense between her and the family causing trouble.

Frowning, Meng Qiaoyuan asked, “What is going on? What do you want?”

The man with the swollen black eye did not answer her. Instead, he pointed at her nose and said to the middle-aged people behind him, “Auntie, Uncle, it was her. Yesterday she admitted my brother and said he had a concussion, then just left it at that! It’s because she delayed things that my brother ended up like this!”

Meng Qiaoyuan was completely bewildered. She had no idea what had happened after she left work yesterday.

The young intern pushed down the arm pointing at Meng Qiaoyuan and said, “Please calm down, sir. This is the outpatient clinic, and there are still many patients waiting in line. If you have something to discuss, please do it somewhere else. Don’t disturb the other patients.”

Several patients waiting behind them were also upset and quickly sided with the intern to help Meng Qiaoyuan out of the situation.

“That’s right! We all made appointments with Dr. Meng and waited a long time to get here! If you’re not here to see a doctor, don’t hold everyone else up!”

“Exactly! If you have a complaint, take it up with the hospital. Why are you taking it out on the doctor here? Do you feel better by stopping other people from getting treatment?”

Faced with the accusations, the troublemakers looked embarrassed. The only middle-aged woman among them raised her voice.

“What do you know? This Doctor Meng is clearly in cardiology, but my son had a concussion from a head injury! She’s a doctor from a completely different specialty, she doesn’t understand anything, and she carelessly ordered a bunch of tests that delayed my son’s treatment! This morning he suddenly deteriorated, and now he’s gone!”

With that, she seemed to lose all strength, collapsed to the floor, and burst into wailing.

“My son! I only had you! How am I supposed to go on living now that you’re gone?”

Meng Qiaoyuan’s elegant brows drew tightly together.

After the drunken concussion patient had been taken away, she had not paid attention to what happened next. That night, after the gas pipeline explosion, the number of patients surged, and doctors from every department came back in to work overtime.

The surgical team led by Shen Mushi and another highly respected senior professor from neurosurgery was highly professional. There was no way a death could have occurred because treatment had been delayed.

That man… was probably not dead from a simple head injury.

Just then, in the confusion, emergency nurse Zeng Yingying heard that a patient’s family was making trouble in Meng Qiaoyuan’s outpatient room. She hurried over and squeezed through the crowd, slipping past the intern’s line of defense to stand behind Meng Qiaoyuan.

Bending down, she said softly, “Doctor Meng, that patient had an intracranial hemorrhage. Because of long-term drinking and smoking, his cerebral vessels were hardened and his arteries were narrowed. Postoperative complications sent him to the ICU in the early hours of the morning, and by sunrise he was gone. They made a scene in the emergency department already and came up here after a nurse let it slip that you were a cardiology doctor.”

Meng Qiaoyuan gave Zeng Yingying a grave look. Fortune and misfortune turn in an instant; who could have predicted such a thing?

“Call security. This is the outpatient clinic. Look at the mess they’ve made.”

“It’s already done. They’ll be here any minute.”

Hearing that security was on the way, the troublemakers at the door suddenly grew agitated.

The middle-aged man shouted, “So what if security comes? We’re not leaving! My son is dead! You have to give us an explanation today!”

The young man chimed in, “That’s right! It’s because of a quack like you! So many patients were there that day—why was everyone else fine except my brother? Wasn’t it because you deliberately delayed his treatment? Don’t think I don’t know it. That day my brother vomited on the floor and you even rolled your eyes at him! You clearly looked down on him and didn’t want to treat him!”