Those years were not easy for me.
Friends, colleagues, loans, and a lawsuit I still don't really want to talk about—one thing after another.
There were things whose truth I only came to understand slowly, many years later. At the time, I knew nothing. I just felt tired.
Very tired.
So tired that I didn't have much to look forward to tomorrow.
I had even wondered what the point was in continuing to live this life.
But life doesn't stop and wait just because one person is tired.
The pharmacy still had to open, and I still had to work. I had to roll up the metal shutter, and patients still came in. The medications still had to be filled, and questions still had to be answered.
No matter what had happened the day before, once the sun came up, I still had to return to my place.
That's how people are sometimes.
Your heart can already be a complete mess, but life still keeps moving forward as usual.
Then I got pregnant.
Life didn't suddenly become kinder to me just because there was another baby in my belly. The things I had to face were still there, and not one of the problems I had to deal with had disappeared.
But strangely, I began to have less time to think about myself.
My attention slowly shifted away from myself and toward the baby in my belly, the child I hadn't even met yet.
Starting around the second month of my pregnancy, I went to Fengshan Longshan Temple almost every day.
With my belly growing more obvious by the day, I knelt there and recited the Ksitigarbha Sutra over and over.
I kept up that routine until about the eighth month of my pregnancy.
Looking back now, I can't really say what I was praying for back then.
Maybe I was praying for peace and safety. Maybe I was praying for my baby to be healthy. Maybe, during the most chaotic period of my life, I simply needed a place where I could quiet myself down.
I didn't receive any special omen, and no dramatic miracle occurred.
I just went every day.
I knelt down, recited the sutra, and went home.
Then I went again the next day.
Back then, I didn't know what the future would bring.
I was simply a pregnant mother.
I began imagining what my baby would look like after she was born.
Who would she look like?
Would she have my eyes?
Would she have a bad personality?
Would she be difficult to raise?
I even began to feel that the life that had once left me with so little to look forward to seemed to have given me something worth waiting for again.
Until a prenatal checkup at around five months pregnant, when the doctor discovered that her heartbeat wasn't right.
An irregular heartbeat.
Those words appeared in my world for the first time.
The doctor told me that a normal fetal heartbeat was around 120 beats per minute.
"Your baby's heartbeat is only thirty."
One hundred twenty.
Thirty.
Of course I understood the difference between those two numbers.
I was a pharmacist. Medical terms weren't completely unfamiliar to me. But when those numbers no longer belonged to a textbook or a medical record, no longer belonged to a patient standing on the other side of the pharmacy counter, but instead fell upon the baby in my own belly, everything was different.
At that moment, I wasn't a pharmacist.
I was only a mother who was five months pregnant.
The doctor continued by asking me:
"Is there a family history of heart disease?"
I thought about it.
As far as my family was concerned, I didn't remember any inherited heart disease. As for the baby's father, I wasn't sure.
After hearing my answer, the doctor suggested that I make a clinic appointment with pediatric cardiology and have Dr. Kai-sheng Hsieh take a look.
I followed the doctor's advice and made a clinic appointment with Dr. Hsieh.
When I got there, I was startled.
Why were there so many people?
The waiting area was full of children and the parents who had accompanied them. I sat among them, my belly sticking out, and waited.
I waited for an hour.
Then kept waiting.
When it had been almost two hours, I suddenly began asking myself:
My baby was still in my belly.
What exactly could I do sitting outside pediatric cardiology?
The other children coming in for appointments had already been born. They could be examined, diagnosed, and treated.
But what about my baby?
She hadn't even come into this world yet.
The more I thought about it, the less sense it made. In the end, I simply left the waiting area and went back to find the doctor who had originally seen me.
I asked him:
"If I make a clinic appointment with Dr. Hsieh now, how will that help my baby? Is there anything we can do to improve the situation right now?"
The doctor told me that they could take another look at other factors for the time being, but they still wouldn't know my baby's actual condition until after she was born.
After hearing that, I thought for a moment.
Okay.
Then I'd go home.
I would do whatever I could.
For what couldn't be done now, I would let nature take its course.
The rest would be left to fate.
After I returned to the pharmacy, I don't think I brought up my baby's irregular heartbeat with anyone on my own.
The pharmacy opened as usual.
I worked as usual.
When patients came in, I handled their medications. When someone asked a question, I answered.
On the surface, almost nothing about my life had changed.
My belly grew day by day, and my baby continued to move.
She kicked me.
She moved around inside my belly.
If not for that prenatal checkup, if not for that "thirty," it would have been difficult for me to know, based on what I felt in my own body, how my baby was different from any other child.
But deep down, I had always kept one question in my heart.
Around the fourth month of my pregnancy, I had an amniocentesis.
It wasn't until the fifth month that we discovered such an obvious problem with my baby's heartbeat.
I thought about this for many years.
More than twenty years have passed, and that question is still with me today.
I don't know whether her heartbeat was originally normal and changed later. I don't know when the abnormality began.
I also don't have enough information to determine what really happened back then, so many years later.
I only remember asking myself over and over:
Why did we not find out until the fifth month?
I have never found an answer to that question.
After that, I didn't go for any more prenatal checkups.
During the rest of my pregnancy, my own body didn't show many unusual symptoms.
The worst episode was when my back hurt terribly.
It hurt so badly that I could barely get up.
I could only lie on the bed and inch along with my body, slowly moving beside the bed, wriggling like a caterpillar. With great difficulty, I finally managed to crawl up little by little.
Looking back now, that was probably the time my body felt the worst during the entire pregnancy.
Other than that, the days somehow continued to pass, one after another.
Later, I told my family about the baby's condition.
I told my sister, and I told my eldest, that after her little sister was born, she might have a heart problem.
My sister took it very seriously.
She went out and bought a book about the heart and brought it home for me to read.
Maybe she didn't know what she could do for me, so the only thing she could think of was to help us understand a little more.
How exactly does the heart work?
Where might the baby's problem be?
We would learn as much as we could, one thing at a time.
It was as if understanding a little more could bring us a little closer to the child who had not yet been born.
Life continued moving forward.
Until I was more than eight months pregnant.
One day, a vendor came to the pharmacy to collect payment.
It was an ordinary business transaction, nothing more, but he casually asked me:
"Where are you planning to give birth?"
I told him I wasn't planning to return to the hospital where I had originally gone, and I also mentioned that the baby in my belly might have an irregular heartbeat.
After hearing that, he told me there was an obstetrics and gynecology hospital on Sanduo Road, and that Dr. Fang was an excellent doctor.
"Why don't you go have him take a look?"
It was just one sentence.
But I took it to heart.
Later, I really did go.
When I arrived at the hospital and met Dr. Fang, I immediately told him which vendor had referred me.
I said that an earlier examination had found that my baby might have a heart problem, and that the vendor had strongly recommended Dr. Fang. I wanted to come in for an examination and find out whether I could prepare to give birth there.
Dr. Fang performed an ultrasound.
He also repeated my blood pressure, blood sugar, and the basic tests normally done during a prenatal checkup.
There was nothing abnormal about my body.
The fetus's size also looked normal.
She was still moving and kicking me inside my belly.
In those respects, she seemed no different from any other baby.
But her heartbeat was different.
I stayed at the hospital for a long time.
They performed fetal heart monitoring.
I lay there while the machine slowly recorded the rhythm of the tiny heart inside my belly.
A little over an hour later, Dr. Fang showed me the monitoring results.
He showed me the heartbeat tracing of a normal fetus, then showed me mine.
You didn't need to understand much medicine.
The difference was already obvious when the two tracings were placed side by side.
The other baby's heartbeat rose and fell rhythmically.
Mine—
Was a complete mess.
At five months, a doctor had told me that there was something wrong with her heartbeat.
Now, at more than eight months, I saw with my own eyes for the first time what that "something wrong" actually looked like.
A heartbeat that couldn't be seen or touched could become a line.
And the line representing the heart inside my belly was different from everyone else's.
But strangely, aside from that tracing, she seemed perfectly normal.
She had normal fetal movement.
The baby's size also showed no obvious abnormality.
My blood pressure, blood sugar, and other basic tests showed no particular problems either.
She continued moving inside my belly.
Sometimes she even made me feel as though she had no idea the adults outside were worrying about her.
By then I was more than eight months pregnant, around thirty-six weeks.
Dr. Fang estimated the baby's weight.
I remember him estimating that she already weighed around 3,600 grams.
He told me that the baby was big enough, and if I wanted to give birth, we could prepare for a C-section.
But when to have the C-section wasn't what I cared about.
I asked him:
"What are we going to do after she comes out?"
That was what I really wanted to know.
Since the fifth month, everyone had told me that we wouldn't know the baby's actual condition until after she was born.
Now, birth was truly right in front of us.
What then?
If her heart really had a serious problem, as the heartbeat tracing indicated, what would happen to her after she left my body?
Dr. Fang explained his arrangements to me very carefully.
Because no one could predict the baby's condition after birth, he would contact the pediatrics department at Gao Yi before delivery.
Director Wu at Gao Yi would also be contacted in advance.
On the day of the C-section, an ambulance would wait downstairs at the hospital.
As soon as the baby was born, she would be sent to Gao Yi immediately if necessary.
It wasn't a matter of thinking of a solution after she was born.
It wasn't a matter of waiting until we discovered that something was wrong before starting to look for a hospital.
Everyone would be prepared first.
Then we would wait for her to be born.
I listened as Dr. Fang explained every detail clearly.
Gao Yi.
Director Wu.
An ambulance.
Waiting on standby.
Those words entered my mind one by one.
When other people prepared to have a baby, they might start getting blankets, clothes, and bottles ready, thinking about when they could hold the baby and bring them home.
Before my baby was even born, the hospital had already prepared an ambulance for her.
But it seemed I didn't have much time left to be afraid.
From the day I heard "thirty" at five months, I had already been waiting for several months.
The answer I had always been told I would have to wait until birth to know was finally coming.
Dr. Fang arranged everything that could be done.
I agreed.
We scheduled the date of the C-section.
I thought all I had to do next was wait for that day to arrive.
I didn't expect that when I actually got to the hospital, something else would happen—something I had never anticipated.
My NHI card had been locked.
I was already in a difficult financial situation, but the hospital told me that because of the problem with my NHI card, I needed to prepare a deposit before the surgery.
I was already at the hospital. The C-section was about to begin. There was a baby in my belly who might need to be sent to Gao Yi immediately after birth.
And at that exact moment, what had us stuck was a single NHI card.
So many years have passed that I no longer remember whether I ended up borrowing the deposit from my sister first.
I only remember that the baby's father went to the National Health Insurance office.
He told me what happened afterward when he came back.
He said that while dealing with the matter at the office, he was so anxious that he slapped the table.
"She's already lying on the operating table. What more do you want?"
I wasn't there.
So I don't know what tone he used, or what the people there looked like.
I only know that in the end, it seemed the matter was handled through installments, and the problem with the NHI card was finally resolved for the time being.
The surgery could go ahead.
Looking back now, that day was actually absurd.
I didn't know what was wrong with my baby's heart.
I didn't know whether she would be safe after birth.
The ambulance was ready, and people at Gao Yi were waiting for her.
Everyone was dealing with something that concerned a human life.
Yet at that critical moment, we still had to find a way to resolve the problem of a locked NHI card first.
That's how life is sometimes.
The truly important thing is already pressing down on you, and then something else suddenly appears beside it—something you have no time to deal with, but cannot avoid dealing with.
In the end, the problem was finally resolved.
I changed into a surgical gown.
I prepared for the C-section.
From the first time I heard that "thirty" at five months until now, I had waited for several months.
I had gone to pediatric cardiology.
I had gone back to ask the doctor what, exactly, could still be done for her.
I had also decided that since there was nothing we could do for the time being, I would go home and let nature take its course.
I returned to work at the pharmacy.
I watched my belly grow day by day.
I felt her kick me.
I felt her move inside me.
My sister bought a book about the heart, and we tried to understand the heart we couldn't see.
When I was more than eight months pregnant, a vendor who came to collect payment casually asked me a question, and it led me to Dr. Fang.
For the first time, I saw that chaotic heartbeat tracing.
Then a group of people who had originally had nothing to do with us began preparing for a child who had not yet been born.
Dr. Fang prepared to deliver her.
Gao Yi prepared to receive her.
Director Wu waited at the other end.
The ambulance downstairs was ready too.
And now, even the NHI card blocking our way had finally been dealt with.
It seemed that everything that could be prepared had been prepared.
All that remained was for her to be born.
I lay down on the operating table.
The operating-room lights were overhead.
Medical staff beside me were preparing to begin.
Downstairs, an ambulance was waiting for my daughter.
I once thought that being pregnant meant simply waiting for a baby to come into the world.
It wasn't until that day that I understood some mothers aren't waiting only for their babies to be born.
They are also waiting for an answer.
What was wrong with her?
Would she be safe?
What would await her after birth?
There wasn't a single one of those questions I could answer.
The only thing I could do was bring her to this day.
Starting in the second month of my pregnancy, I knelt in Longshan Temple again and again to recite the Ksitigarbha Sutra.
Back then, I didn't know what I was really praying for.
Now, it seemed I hadn't received any guarantees either.
No one told me:
Don't worry. She'll definitely be safe.
No one told me:
The road ahead will be easy.
All I received were one unknown after another.
But she was still inside my belly.
In the place closest to me.
That heart that had once been counted at only thirty beats per minute, that had once become a tangled mess on the monitoring tracing, was still beating.
I don't know what will happen after you are born.
I don't know what kind of fate the ambulance downstairs will carry you toward.
I know even less whether, when you truly come into this world, I will be too late to see you even once.
All of that happened later.
For now, I was simply lying on the operating table.
Waiting for you to be born.