Chapter Six: I Knew What I Was Facing
As Pengpeng slowly grew, I often forgot that she was a child who needed more care than other children.
It wasn't that I had truly forgotten there was something wrong with her heart.
She had a pacemaker implanted. How could I possibly forget that?
It was just that we lived together every day. I watched her sit in her crab walker, eat, learn to walk, and start talking. As time passed, she became, in my eyes, simply my daughter.
I paid attention to the things I needed to pay attention to.
I never truly let my guard down where I needed to be careful.
But I didn't want her whole life to be reduced to the two words "sick child."
She still had to go outside.
She had to see the world beyond our home.
She had to be carried around and taken places.
She also had to live her life with us.
She laughed, cried, and threw tantrums.
She had foods she liked, and times when she didn't want something, she simply didn't want it.
Every day, I wasn't dealing with a child in a medical record.
I was dealing with Pengpeng.
My younger daughter, who lived alongside me in the pharmacy, clung to me, and learned more and more every day.
So a lot of the time, I didn't even keep thinking about her condition.
Back then, I always believed that if I took good care of her, our days would keep moving forward, slowly and steadily.
Still, somewhere deep inside, there was a very, very small place that knew some things about her were different from those of ordinary children.
Once, the three of us went to Dizang Chansi.
At the time, we had hoped to meet Master Dijiao.
But after we arrived, we learned that the temple's abbot seemed to have changed.
There were a lot of people there that day.
I held Pengpeng while she and her father stood in line with me. We waited for a long time.
As I remember it, it was more than an hour.
Waiting that long with such a young child was obviously not easy.
But since we'd already come, we continued waiting.
Pengpeng wore a beautiful new outfit that day.
I had dressed her up beautifully and held her in my arms as the three of us slowly moved forward with the crowd.
Looking back now, I can't remember what that outfit looked like at all.
But I remember taking special care to dress her up nicely that day.
That's just how mothers are.
Even when we're only taking a child out, we still want to dress her up beautifully.
Especially when we're going to pray for blessings.
There's just something joyful about holding your clean, beautiful child in your arms.
When it was finally our turn, I told the master that I hoped he could pray for the child's safety and well-being.
I had already been thinking about having Pengpeng take refuge in Buddhism.
After hearing that, the master asked whether we wanted to take refuge together.
Since we were already there, we decided to do it together.
So in the end, it wasn't just Pengpeng.
Pengpeng's father, Pengpeng, and I—all three of us—took refuge together.
We each received a Dharma name.
But more than twenty years have passed, and I can no longer remember what Pengpeng's Dharma name was.
Some things are just like that.
At the time, you think you'll definitely remember them for the rest of your life. But once enough time passes, they slowly become blurred.
Sometimes I try hard to remember.
But when you can't remember, you can't remember.
I don't want to fill in an uncertain Dharma name just to make this story complete.
What has been forgotten can remain forgotten.
But I still remember something the master said to me that day.
He spoke to me very seriously:
"If—I mean, just in case—if this child were to pass away, then we would use Buddhist funeral rites."
I truly can't remember whether he explained anything else afterward.
But I haven't forgotten that sentence.
Strangely, I wasn't frightened at the time.
And hearing the words "pass away" didn't make me wonder whether the master was foretelling something.
No.
I simply took it in.
Because I had always known that Pengpeng's body was different from other children's.
The things she had gone through after birth couldn't truly disappear from my memory just because life had gradually returned to normal.
I simply didn't keep those worries on my lips every day.
If the first thing I thought about every morning was "My child isn't healthy," how were we supposed to live?
So we lived the life we needed to live, just as usual.
I could love her as an ordinary little girl.
I could play with her.
I could watch her learn to walk.
I could laugh when she bit into a Likole cracker with a loud, crunchy crackle.
And I could look forward to her growing a little older and learning even more things.
But as her mother, I couldn't possibly be completely unaware of what she carried with her.
So after hearing the master's words that day, I wasn't afraid.
I simply kept them in my heart.
I knew what I was facing.
That didn't mean I knew exactly what would happen in the future.
I didn't.
I had never thought that way.
Back then, I still believed Pengpeng would continue to grow up.
I simply knew she was different from ordinary children.
Some risks existed, and I couldn't pretend they didn't.
Knowing that was one thing.
Holding her every day and accompanying her as she grew was another.
Then we thanked the master.
We held Pengpeng and drove home, the three of us together.
Life went on.
Later, Pengpeng came down with a fever.
Looking back now, it was probably just an ordinary cold.
But with Pengpeng, whenever anything seemed even slightly wrong, I always paid a little more attention than I would with an ordinary child.
Unfortunately, our financial situation was truly bad at the time.
We had already arranged to pay our health insurance premiums in installments, but then we couldn't keep up with the payments, and our health insurance card stopped working normally.
Those days couldn't be summed up by the simple phrase "we had no money."
We still had to eat every day.
The pharmacy still had to be stocked.
Formula, diapers, and all the things a child needed in daily life didn't suddenly stop being necessary just because money was tight.
The bills that were due still arrived.
We delayed whatever we could.
We found a way to deal with whatever we could.
But a sick child couldn't be put off.
If a child had a fever, we couldn't simply skip the doctor because the health insurance card didn't work.
So I took her to a nearby clinic, Daze Clinic.
It was a general family medicine clinic that also saw pediatric patients.
As soon as I went in, I told the doctor about Pengpeng's condition.
"She has a congenital irregular heartbeat, and she has a pacemaker implanted."
After learning that, the doctor was especially careful as well.
He took her ear temperature.
He looked at her throat.
He performed the basic tests.
At the time, it looked more like an ordinary cold.
The doctor prescribed medication for her and gave me specific instructions:
If the fever didn't go down, because her condition was unusual, I shouldn't wait. I needed to take her back to Kaohsiung Medical University Hospital right away.
Of course I understood all that.
I was a pharmacist myself.
But being a pharmacist and being a mother were two completely different things.
I knew how to give her the medicine and how often she needed to take it.
I also knew what signs meant she needed to see a doctor again.
But when it was your own child with a fever, you still worried.
Professional knowledge didn't suddenly make a mother lose her feelings.
All it could do was make sure that, even while I was worried, I at least knew what the next step should be.
Once I brought the medicine home, I gave it to her on schedule.
Fortunately, the fever went down quickly that time.
Pengpeng also returned to her usual energetic self.
That doctor had once come to my pharmacy to buy something.
Even though our health insurance card couldn't be used that day, he charged me only two hundred dollars.
I didn't ask why he charged only two hundred.
I don't know what he had been thinking, either.
So I won't guess for him.
But I've remembered what he did all these years.
When people are going through the hardest times, sometimes someone simply charges you a little less or gives a little more thought to your situation, and you remember it for a long time.
Because two hundred dollars meant something completely different to me then than two hundred dollars means now.
That time, we made it through without anything going seriously wrong.
She took the medicine.
The fever went down.
Life returned to normal.
But one day later on, I realized something was wrong.
This time it wasn't like the fever.
Pengpeng was breathing hard.
She had also started to swell.
I knew at a glance that this wasn't something we could handle by giving her cold medicine at home and waiting to see what happened.
That kind of shortness of breath was different from an ordinary child breathing hard after running around and playing until she was tired.
And with the swelling, I knew clearly that this was beyond anything I could handle myself at the pharmacy.
We couldn't wait.
There was no "let's see if she's better tomorrow," either.
We went straight to the emergency room at Kaohsiung Medical University Hospital.
Because Pengpeng had been an unusual child from birth, the hospital already knew she had a heart problem and a pacemaker.
With the addition of the shortness of breath and swelling, she was admitted to the intensive care unit after being evaluated in the emergency room.
Looking back now, I wouldn't describe it as her suddenly becoming critically ill or anything like that.
What was closer to the truth was this—
Her physical condition had always been unusual.
When she developed shortness of breath and swelling this time, it was natural for the hospital to handle the situation cautiously.
Once she was in the intensive care unit, we left her in the care of the nurses.
They started an IV.
They gave her medication.
That included diuretics, in the hope of bringing down the swelling first.
But putting an IV into a small child is truly not easy.
Their veins are so tiny.
They're so small.
And she had no idea why adults had suddenly grabbed her or why they were bringing a needle near her.
Adults understand that it was treatment.
But how could a one-year-old child know what treatment was?
All she knew was that someone had grabbed her.
Someone had a needle.
It hurt.
Mom was right nearby, so why wouldn't she pick her up and take her away?
When the nurses were trying to find a vein and secure the IV, they told us to wait outside for a while.
The child would definitely struggle, and she would definitely cry.
Having her parents standing nearby would only make it more painful for us, and might make her struggle even harder.
So we went outside.
We stood there and waited.
That kind of waiting was strange.
I knew the nurses inside were helping her.
I also knew she had to have the IV.
But whenever I thought of my child crying inside, I still wanted to keep looking in.
And yet I couldn't go in.
I don't know how long it took inside.
I only knew that they didn't let us go back in until the nurses had finished.
When I returned and saw Pengpeng, the IV was already in place.
As soon as she saw me, she cried again.
That cry felt completely different from hearing her through the door a moment earlier.
Because now she could see her mother.
It was as if she'd finally found someone she could complain to.
But she had probably cried herself out, too.
Before long, she fell asleep.
I watched her sleep.
The IV continued dripping beside her, one drop at a time.
The ordeal from a moment before finally seemed to have paused for the time being.
Only after seeing her asleep did I feel a little relieved.
The nurse told us,
"Mom and Dad, you can go home for now. If there's any problem, we'll contact you."
So we really did go home.
Looking back now, someone might find it strange.
The child had been admitted to the intensive care unit, so how could her mother still go home?
But at the time, I truly had no other choice.
The pharmacy had to open.
I had to work.
I needed an income.
I had already struggled so hard just to pay the health insurance premiums. If I stopped opening the pharmacy too, where would I get the money for Pengpeng's medical bills and living expenses?
Many things aren't a choice between "the child is important" and "work is important."
Of course my child was important.
Precisely because she was important, I couldn't let us lose the income we needed to keep living.
There was no one who could take every practical problem away from me.
All I could do was worry about her while continuing to do what needed to be done.
It wasn't that I wasn't worried.
And it certainly wasn't that I had abandoned my child at the hospital and left her unattended.
It was just that sometimes life doesn't automatically press pause on everything else because your child is sick.
So we left Kaohsiung Medical University Hospital.
We went back to the pharmacy.
It took about twenty or thirty minutes to get back from the hospital.
I opened the pharmacy.
Maybe part of me was thinking that Pengpeng was probably asleep by then.
A nurse was watching her.
Her IV was already in place.
If anything really happened, the hospital would call.
That was what the nurse had just told us herself.
We had barely been back, perhaps not even half an hour, when the phone rang.
It was Kaohsiung Medical University Hospital.
As soon as I answered, the nurse's voice sounded urgent.
"Pengpeng's mom, Pengpeng's mom, your son just won't stop crying!"
Son?
When had my daughter become a son?
Pengpeng had a delicate, pretty look when she was little, but perhaps she also had a bit of a boyish streak. In her hurry, the nurse had actually called her a son.
But I wasn't in the mood to correct her.
The nurse continued:
"I'm afraid you'll need to come back and stay with her in the intensive care unit. We can't soothe her. She keeps crying and asking for her mom."
I knew immediately.
Not again.
The child who had cried for nearly two hours in Zuoying, whom Fourth Sister and Sijia had been unable to soothe, was now in the intensive care unit, and even the nurses had no idea what to do with her.
She was still looking for her mother.
The first time in Zuoying, I had thought that if the people caring for her loved her enough, she would gradually get used to them.
But less than two hours later, I had gone back and taken her in my arms.
Now it was the hospital.
She was surrounded by professional nurses.
She still wouldn't accept it.
She didn't want someone who was better at caring for children.
Nor did she want someone with more experience.
She had simply woken up and not seen the person she was looking for.
I didn't think twice.
The pharmacy had only just opened, and I had to go back to Kaohsiung Medical University Hospital.
I had barely opened the door before I had to leave again.
But this time, I didn't hesitate for even a moment.
Because I knew—
she was waiting for me.