Read Chapter 11: — THE WISDOM OF NOT GETTING SICK

A trainee approached Li after a teaching session.

“We spend our lives learning how to find disease,” he said. “Does anyone teach us how not to become patients?”

The room laughed.

The trainee did not.

“I’m serious. I’m exhausted. I compare myself with everyone. I sleep badly. Some days I feel as if I’m disappearing.”

Li stopped smiling.

He had heard versions of the same confession from residents who believed competence should make them immune to ordinary human weakness.

“Health is not a moral reward,” he said. “You can do everything right and still become ill. But you can stop treating your body like collateral.”

He spoke about sleep, food, movement, mental-health care, preventive follow-up and the slow poison of measuring one’s private life against everyone else’s public success.

“You think other people are ahead because you only see what they show. You don’t see debt, grief, illness, fear or luck underneath it.”

That week, the department reviewed a young woman with neurological symptoms and widespread abnormalities on imaging. The first fear was metastatic cancer. The pattern, however, refused to behave like a clean malignancy.

Li argued for infection and inflammatory disease.

Further investigation eventually supported disseminated tuberculosis.

The trainees celebrated the diagnostic reversal.

Li cut them off.

“Do not fall in love with being right. The patient does not care whether the case is elegant. She cares whether we help her.”

A week later, the trainee who had admitted feeling depressed returned privately.

“I made an appointment with a mental-health professional.”

He said it like a confession.

Li looked at him.

“Why are you telling me as if you failed an exam?”

“Doctors are supposed to cope.”

“Doctors are supposed to recognise when something needs treatment. Congratulations. You’re behaving like a doctor.”

The trainee laughed, then began to cry, which embarrassed him more.

Li handed him tissues and pretended to become very interested in a workstation.

Chenxi, meanwhile, noticed that Li applied his own principles badly.

Whenever she found him still working after midnight, she repeated his line.

“The best doctor is yourself?”

“I said best. Not obedient.”

“You’re impossible.”

“So I’ve been told.”

Their relationship was changing in increments too small to name.

Old Zhao noticed every one of them.

He had stopped matchmaking openly because Chenxi threatened to classify it as harassment.

He had not stopped smiling.