The resuscitation efforts in the ICU room came to a halt. The doctor stepped out and looked at Hamish, who was kneeling on the ground, not knowing how to begin.
Hamish looked up at the doctor standing before him. He wanted to stand up and ask about Elisa’s condition, but his legs felt as heavy as lead, making even the slightest movement impossible.
He opened his mouth and heard his own hoarse voice asking, “Elisa… How is she?”
“Mr. Burns, I’m sorry. We did our best.”
His mind felt like it had been struck by a bomb, a brief blankness that left him devoid of thought. He didn’t even know where he was or what he was going through.
The eyes that were usually sharp like a hawk’s now looked dull and lifeless, devoid of their usual brilliance.
Hamish had never felt such fear before. He rarely cried, and he couldn’t recall crying more than five times in his entire life. But this time, tears fell incessantly, as if they would never stop.
In a state of confusion, he grabbed hold of the doctor’s white coat, as if clutching at a lifeline.
Hamish, who would never utter a soft word under normal circumstances, now seemed to have lost his pride and arrogance. He knelt on the ground in despair, pleading for the first time in his life.
He held onto the doctor’s white coat and begged, “Please, save her. She’s only twenty-four…”
Yes, Elisa was only twenty-four. It suddenly dawned on him how young she was, how she was on the brink of losing her life in the prime of her youth.
Even though his brain wanted to shut out the external sources, her ears still heard clearly the second half of the doctor’s words.
“Your wife… Miss Powell. We did everything we could during the six-hour resuscitation. She was injected with a neurotoxic agent. Normally, a single dose of it is excruciatingly painful, rendering one’s life worse than death. And we detected a total of five doses in her system. Now, she has suffered brain trauma and brainstem hemorrhage…”
Hamish’s vision began to darken, and it took him a while to croak out, “What will happen?”
“… she has become a vegetative state,” the doctor whispered softly.
Hamish’s face turned pale, and under the light, his lips appeared excessively white.
Hamish knew that kind of mind-destroying agent. He had used it before to interrogate traitors. He remembered how a single dose made the person writhe in pain on the ground, eventually driving them insane.
He never imagined that such a drug would be used on Elisa, and not just once, but five times. Fragmented scenes flashed through his mind.
“Hamish, do you know what I might encounter in the future? If something happens to me…”
He never thought Elisa would face all this. If he had known, he would never have let her go.
The more he thought about it, the more painful his heart felt. He clenched his lips, gritted his teeth, and coughed lightly. To his surprise, he tasted the metallic tang of blood in his throat, a suffocating sensation overwhelming him.
Vegetative state. Elisa, his wife of four years, had become a vegetable.
She would no longer smile at him, scold him, cry in grievance, or leave a light on every night, waiting for him to come home for dinner.
Hamish tightly grasped the doctor’s white coat with one hand, while the other pressed firmly against his chest, where his heart was pounding violently, as if someone was wielding a giant hammer and striking it with increasing force.
In this dull pain, he felt suffocated but dared not take a deep breath. It was as if he would inhale not oxygen but shards of ice, freezing his organs, causing pain in every part of his body.
“Mr. Burns, you can go in now…”
Hamish didn’t move. After a moment, he blinked his dry eyes and asked hoarsely, “Vegetative patients can wake up, right?”
“There is a chance for vegetative patients to wake up, but Miss Powell’s situation is different. Even if she wakes up, her advanced-stage stomach cancer doesn’t leave her much time.”
“You said she has advanced-stage stomach cancer?”
The doctor nodded solemnly.
“Heh…” Hamish laughed out loud, swaying unsteadily as he stood up. “So, you all conspired to deceive me!”