“Did she wake up early and send you to deceive me? She lied to me before, saying she had stomach cancer. Now she comes again, claiming to be in a vegetative state!” Hamish exclaimed in an extreme manner. “She wants to leave me, so she fabricated this lie about her impending death to make me let her go. This time, I won’t believe it anymore!”
The doctor took two steps back, unable to find words to describe Hamish’s mad state.
“Mr. Burns…” he began, but before he could finish, he saw Hamish rush into the ICU room without any regard. With a loud bang, he pushed open the door, only to suddenly stop in his tracks.
Elisa lay on the bed, peacefully as if asleep. There was a deep tube inserted into her throat, and she wore an oxygen mask on her face. A nasal cannula extended from her nostrils. At this moment, she couldn’t breathe on her own and relied on machines for the most basic life functions. The line on the heart rate monitor was extremely weak, almost resembling a flat line.
Hamish’s vision went black, and he almost lost his footing. He clutched his chest, and blood gushed from his throat.
Could this really be Elisa?
“I don’t believe it… I don’t believe it…” Hamish stumbled forward and stood beside Elisa. At that moment, he felt as if his own heart was about to stop beating.
“Elisa, for God’s sake, wake up! What are you pretending for? You previously colluded with the hospital to deceive me about having stomach cancer. And now you’re here again! Do you think I’m a fool? Do you think that having a tube in your mouth makes you a vegetable?” He reached to remove it, but cries of alarm came from the ICU room, and all the medical staff present rushed forward to restrain him.
“Mr. Burns, what are you doing?”
“Let go of me! I know she’s fine. She has already woken up. She can’t be in the late stage of stomach cancer, nor can she be a vegetable!” Hamish repeated over and over, as if caught in a trance.
He himself didn’t know if he was saying these words for others to hear or to comfort himself.
There was only one thought in his mind: Elisa was fine. The thing he despised most was being deceived, but this time he forgave her for lying. He could pretend that nothing had happened as long as she woke up.
“Mr. Burns, I don’t know where you get the confidence to think that Miss Powell is faking her illness and doesn’t have stomach cancer,” the man holding him spoke loudly. “Ten medical personnel in this room personally performed surgery on her, using six hours to save her faint breath. Do you know what consequences it would have caused if you had removed her oxygen tube just now? She would have died!”
Hamish seemed unable to listen to his words.
The man gritted his teeth and nodded. “Fine, you don’t believe it, then come and take a good look.” He forcefully threw Elisa’s medical records in Hamish’s face.
Hamish slowly lowered his head and looked at the case files scattered on the ground. It felt like time had slowed down as he picked up page after page to examine them.
This wasn’t the first time he had seen such case files. On the day the Powell family went bankrupt, Elisa went to the hospital, and the doctor also presented these kinds of case files.
He believed it at the time, feeling numb and cold. He regretted it deeply. But when Elisa woke up, the nurse showed him several new case files and told him that Elisa had deceived her, that she never had stomach cancer, just ordinary gastric bleeding. Elisa herself admitted it at the time.
“These case files can be forged.”
Even the young nurse on the side couldn’t bear it any longer and spoke up, “Mr. Burns, we have been trying to save Miss Powell. We have no time to forge case files. It doesn’t benefit our hospital at all.”
“If you don’t believe these case files, then at least believe the images on this screen. This is the condition of Miss Powell’s stomach.”
Following her voice, Hamish looked over. Was that really a human stomach?