How to Raise a Baby in an Apocalypse - Chapter 9 - Bed Number 18
An Ran instinctively felt an urge to refuse. Her backhand was a bit itchy, which made her quite uncomfortable. She didn’t know if the itch was related to the blackened water she used to wash her hand, but as she scratched her hand a few times, she realized she wasn’t hungry at all. Upon further reflection, she indeed had not eaten anything since yesterday after she had given birth. Weird, why wasn’t she hungry?
She wondered if she had already become too hungry, and that was not a good sign since she did not want the milk she had pumped to go to waste. An Ran thanked the mother in bed number 17 and took the bread that was offered. She then ate the bread while walking towards her bed, lost in her thoughts.
“Hey, can you help me press the bell?”
At t his moment, there was no one surrounding the mother in bed number 18 anymore. The waves of relatives were finally gone. Her husband, mother-in-law and a few of her aunts were here just a few moments ago, but she heard that they had gone to argue with the doctor about transferring to a VIP room. In the end, the doctor could not arrange it right away, so they went to the doctor’s office to confront them.
So when the woman in bed number 18 spoke up, it was meant for An Ran. In reality, the woman did not want to look for a doctor. She just wanted to press the bell so that someone would come check on her.
“You can press it yourself.”
An Ran turned around and glanced at the woman lying on the bed. She looked to be around 24 or 25 years old, which was a year or two years older than An Ran. Before An Ran turned 20, she had already graduated from the technical school, took on a job and married her ex-husband a year after that. She maintained her marriage with her ex-husband for a year, struggled for 10 months to give birth to her child, and now she is almost 23 years old!
Because of that, An Ran could not quite understand. Both were about the same age, and both had given birth naturally, yet the woman lying down on bed number 18 was ordering her around as if she just had a cesarean section.
“I can’t get up~!” The woman in bed number 18 looked at An Ran with tears in her eyes while lying on the bed, looking pitiful. She even had a hint of pleading in her tone as she said, “I am bleeding lochia quite heavily, and it is really uncomfortable. Can you please help me?”
An Ran ignored her, acting as if she had never given birth to a child before while maintaining a frail demeanor.
In actuality, An Ran was feeling quite stressed at the moment as she was thinking about how she could get her daughter out of the neonatal unit. Even though she had helped the woman in bed number 17 with retrieving the bread without much thought, she had no interest in helping the woman in bed number 18 at all.
Walking back to her side of the curtain, An Ran retrieved her phone and ate her bread while contemplating on who she could contact at this time, preferably someone with the influence and power to get her daughter out of the neonatal unit.
The corner of the curtain was opened once again. It was the woman in bed number 17. With a sheen of sweat on her face while enduring the pain from her incision wound, she said to An Ran, “Hey, let’s talk for a bit, otherwise I won’t be able to bear this pain. What is your name?”
“An Ran!”
An Ran hung her head, her eyes glued on the list of names on her phone as she scrolled through the contact numbers while leaning against the bedside. Her loosely-tied bun was a mess, and her hair was greasy due to excessive sweating, which made her look as disheveled as one could have looked in such a stressful situation.
“My name is Hu Zhen. You can call me Sister Zhen since you seem like you’re younger than me by a lot. Are you over 20 years old?”
“Yeah, I am almost 23.”
“Oh, I thought you were a single mother because you looked really young at first. Why isn’t your husband here with you?”
Hu Zhen genuinely seemed to be in a lot of pain due to her cesarean section, so she kept looking for a topic to talk about with An Ran. But An Ran was becoming impatient and stopped scrolling through her contact list. Lifting up her head, An Ran looked at Hu Zhen and said:
“Sister Zhen, I think there’s something wrong with this hospital. I’m going to check out the situation first, you go ahead and get some rest.”