Chapter 49 – Say Something (2)
Zhao Xi didn’t dare sleep at night. She would stay by the bed and try to at least make him eat a bit when he woke up. He was sweating so profusely that the sheets would all be drenched. She stayed up at night wiping his forehead, hands and feet in an attempt to lower his body temperature. She made sure he was covered when she did this; she didn’t want him to catch a cold. She began warming up the room by burning some coal in the oven so that he wouldn’t be chilly.
She took him out in the sun early next morning. The first rays of the winter sun were particularly warm and effective for his condition. She left him in the wheelchair in the sun and went inside to dig through some medical books left behind by her Grandmaster. The books were positively ancient, and the covers were all musty and fragile. Some pages were missing from the books as well. She tried reading them in the hopes that she could help Shen Fei, but the writings were hardly legible and were so complex that she couldn’t recognize some of them. She despaired over the fact that she had let these precious and great texts reduce to dust.
Grandmaster had passed the texts to her thinking she would care for it. These were precious manuscripts that were passed down from one generation to the next. In the early days, Zhao Xi had looked at them occasionally, trying to decipher the names of endless medicinal herbs and processes but had given up after a while. The writings were so difficult to read and usually had information of herbs and plants that had gone extinct. People had used the medicinal plants for their benefit, gathering and harvesting them but had never sown them back, so in time, they had completely disappeared. The five-hundred-year-old ginseng that Zhao Xi found were not very uncommon in the old days, but now they were almost impossible to find.
The book contained medicinal recipes that usually involved ingredients which were either extinct or extremely rare, so the price for these medicines were unaffordable to the common people. Zhao Xi’s patients weren’t wealthy, it was hard for them to get by, as it is. Zhao Xi had thought these books useless due to the rare ingredients they used, which had become unavailable in her time. So, she had kept these precious books aside and forgotten about it.
She opened these books after a very long time and did her best to read through them. She realized that the ingredients were not the most important aspect of the endless medical processes the books outlined. The way of the treatment itself was what was essential. She read through the properties and effects of the ingredients, and contemplated substituting them with the more accessible ingredients which had the most similarities with the rare ones. Even if the treatment may not be as potent, it would still be effective! She was inspired to use what she knew already and apply it in the way the books instructed, so that she can improvise and come up with something beneficial to help Shen Fei.
Zhao Xi was grateful to find a section dedicated to the patient’s medical history. She couldn’t find anything that was close to Shen Fei’s condition, but she found a case of a patient whose entire body was paralyzed which was slightly comparable to what he suffered. The patient’s condition had been too severe and had ultimately died. The patient had suffered from lethargy, profuse sweating and fits of coughing up blood. He had eventually died due to heavy bleeding through the skin. Shen Fei had lethargy, sweating and the occasional coughing up of blood. But he wasn’t bleeding through the skin, yet. She hoped he wouldn’t. She looked at him, outside in the courtyard.
Ping An was also gone these days. It had been busy hunting and gathering food for winter. She rarely saw it. It had been absent for two days. She turned back to her texts and read through, taking time to decipher the words. She didn’t want to commit a blunder when his condition was already so delicate. The binding of the book was already very broken, and the writings were complex. In some places, the writings changed, possibly because other people had tried to add new and useful information on the pages. She had to tread carefully. So, she read and read and tried to get the whole picture of what went wrong with Shen Fei.
She found out after extensively reading the texts that Shen Fei’s body was trying to cleanse itself from the inside, and that she hadn’t made an error. Chinese Medicine was about nursing the body back to health both outside and inside. The medicine she had been making him ingest was detoxifying his body from the inside, while the acupuncture was for the exterior. The combination of both these treatments were making his aftereffects more severe. His profuse sweating and coughing up blood, were just an indication of the toxins and excretions trying to leave the body. The toxins in the blood were particularly hard to discharge, so he was coughing blood.
Shen Fei’s wounds were also internal. The internal bleeding was causing all the problems. The excess blood was gathering in some parts of his body, causing numbness and paralysis. Zhao Xi needed to find a way to cleanse his body of the remaining toxins, and to allow the excess blood to flow out of the body. She had already begun to plan the treatment process and put safety precautions in place when she heard a faint calling of her name. She almost didn’t hear it.
“Zhao Xi….”
She was dazed for a moment before she could wrap her head around the notion that it was Shen Fei. He was calling her.