Chapter 2163: Chapter 1424: Good News
The newly appeared sensory boundary on Mr. Chen’s upper abdomen didn’t move for the next two weeks. Every morning, Manstein swabbed that patch of skin with a cotton swab from top to bottom, and the boundary always stopped at the exact same position, between the xiphoid and the navel, one-third of the way up, two centimeters. From the fourth to the sixth week post-surgery, a full fourteen days, it didn’t advance a millimeter.
Those two centimeters seemed frozen in time. The first thing Mr. Chen did upon waking each day was to look down at his belly. Of course, he saw nothing with his eyes; the sensory boundary wasn’t a real line, not drawn in ink, but it was more real than any line he had ever seen. It was there, lying beneath his skin like an invisible dam, starkly separating the land above, which had regained sensation, from the dormant Dead Sea below.
Mr. Chen began to feel uneasy.
He didn’t say it, but Manstein could see it. A person’s eyes can’t conceal things. Every time Mr. Chen saw Manstein enter the ward, his eyes were full of hope; after the examination, realizing the boundary hadn’t moved, his eyes showed disappointment; when Manstein said, "Come back tomorrow," his eyes filled with hope again. This cycle repeated once a day, like a clock that would never stop ticking. Sometimes, Manstein intentionally came half an hour late, and Mr. Chen would keep glancing at the ward entrance, unable to hide his anxiety. When Manstein finally arrived and completed the examination, the result was the same, and Mr. Chen would pretend to be nonchalant, saying, "It’s okay, no rush."
"Jianguo, don’t keep staring at that boundary," Sister Li couldn’t help but say one day.
"Will it disappear if I don’t look at it?"
"It won’t, but looking at it won’t make it move faster either."
"How do you know? Maybe if I look at it, it will know someone is waiting, and it will move a bit faster."
His words made Sister Li laugh: "Nerves aren’t people; they don’t know someone is waiting for them. Even if you looked at it eight hundred times a day, it would move as fast or as slow as it should."
"I still want to look," Mr. Chen said stubbornly, like a disobedient child.
Sister Li didn’t try to persuade him further. She put the towel in the water basin, wrung it out, and continued to wipe his legs.
On the third day of the sixth week post-surgery, Manstein brought both good news and bad news.
The good news was that there was a change in the electromyography. Clara placed electrodes on the muscles of Mr. Chen’s upper abdomen and asked him to try to contract his abs. Mr. Chen tried several times, feeling nothing, yet weak, irregular signals emerged on the electromyography. They weren’t normal voluntary movement signals but something called "nascent potentials," with wide waveforms, small amplitudes, and long durations. Clara magnified the waveform again and again, and those wavy lines on the screen resembled a river slowly and clumsily waking from slumber.
"Mr. Chen, look at this," Manstein pointed at the waveform on the screen.
Mr. Chen didn’t understand those wavy lines, but he saw the restrained satisfaction on Manstein’s face.
"What does it mean?"
"It means that some nerves have been repaired and have formed initial neuromuscular connections. These connections are still weak and immature, insufficient to truly contract your abdominal muscles. But they are there; now it’s just a matter of time."
"What’s the bad news?"
Manstein paused. He rarely paused. As a neuroscientist, he was accustomed to using precise language to describe everything, including bad news. But this time, he paused.
"The bad news is, the abdominal muscles are just the first stop; the real challenges lie ahead."
Mr. Chen said:
"Professor Mainshtan, that’s not bad news; it’s something I knew. You told me from the start that it would take a long time; it’s only been a month and a half, I’m not in a hurry."
Manstein looked at him without speaking. He knew in his heart that Mr. Chen was lying. Mr. Chen was in a hurry, very much so. How could someone lying in a hospital bed for six weeks, staring at their belly every day to see if there was any movement, not be impatient? But he didn’t expose him. Sometimes, a person needs to lie to make themselves feel a bit better, so don’t take away their right to lie. Manstein had seen too many patients, understanding the weight of these lies. They weren’t self-deception; they were a survival instinct.
In the eighth week post-surgery, Mr. Chen was discharged.
Not because he had recovered, but because staying in the hospital had little meaning. All acute phase treatments were done; surgery wounds had healed; the risk of infection had passed; all that was left was to wait, to wait for the nerves to grow a millimeter a day. This could be done at a hotel just as well as in a hospital. Manstein arranged an apartment near the Institute for him, a ten-minute walk from the laboratory. He would come to the Institute for rehabilitation training daily and return to the apartment to rest in the evening.
Sister Li tidied up the apartment very cleanly. She placed a recovery bed in the living room, installed handrails next to the bed, and put a plastic chair in the bathroom. Photos she brought from home were affixed by the bed: a young Mr. Chen in police uniform, their wedding photo, a family picture taken when their child was one month old. These photos were meticulously arranged in an arc, like a small family shrine.
Mr. Chen sat on the bed, looking at those photos, staring for a long time.
"Do you think I can wear that police uniform again?"
Sister Li was packing when she heard this question, and her hands paused for a moment.
