Surgical mask, check. Googles, check. Gloves, check.

I’d never thought one day when I went to the way-too-familiar Huaxi hospital, I would feel like going to the bullet-flying battlefield. However, I have to go. I received a WeChat message from my doctor, asking me to fetch my prescription. I couldn’t postpone my evaluation check any longer. We need to make sure that my new treatment actually works.

I thought after six month, I should get used to this, being trapped and threatened. But the fact is you would never get used to it. Right now my immune system couldn’t stand any kind of attack. If I got infected, it would be deadly. But just as one of my patient pals said: “Cancer or virus, either kills. So choose”.

On the way to the hospital, I heard constant warmings from my Baidu navigation: “There is a confirmed case nearby, please remember to wear surgical mask”. Honestly, there were times in a wave of panic, I wanted to turn around and head back home. “Screw it,” I murmured to myself, “you have already been a confirmed case of something with a much higher mortality rate---the cancer. So what’s to be afraid of?”

Finally I arrived.

The Huaxi hospital, used to be always overcrowded, is now almost empty. The hospital, by all the means in its power, has prevented the patients coming. It has to. With most of its resources assigned to fight the virus, it can only accept a small part of the patients with other disease. And the patients, if they had options, would not go to the hospital any way.

You can’t image how I felt when I finally arrived there, and found there was neither my prescription nor my doctor waiting there. When I reached my doctor through WeChat, all I got was an unreasonable explanation: My prescription was overdue. It was bloody ridiculous. If it’s overdue, why she asked to come in the first place? When I tried to reason with her, she cut it off leaving me speechless.

WTF. Cusswords don’t come to me easily, from the fact that the F word was the first word that came into my mind, and you could tell the impact of her behavior. I tried to be understanding here. There must be a chaos in hospital right now and I could totally understand if she just made a mistake, like forgot to prescribe for me. It’s her attitude afterwards that I felt it hard to accept. I don’t need her apologize or be nice to me. In fact, if she could just show the least attempt to fix it instead of, you know, shifting the blame, I would feel a lot better and be grateful.

It was not that hard. Even she already left the hospital, she still could ask one of her colleagues for help. A call and a few minutes’ effort could save my day, could make all of my time, my struggles, and risks at least worth something.

Is it too much to ask?