DSMIS CH12

Chapter 12: Cleared of Suspicion Because I’m Too Useless?

When the grilled fish was served, Jiang Lin used a knife to portion it out, speaking with a light smile:

“Actually, even before we reached the repair shop, I already knew there was a high probability you were clean.”

Shen Xing looked up between bites of meat, narrowing his eyes slightly:

“Because Heibao sniffed my suitcase?”

“Not just because of that. Drug traffickers are extremely vigilant; if there really were something wrong with the car, they would never let a stranger touch the vehicle—especially after spotting a breed like a German Shepherd, which would make them even more guarded. But you didn’t react like that at all. And another thing is…”

Jiang Lin paused mid-sentence, piquing Shen Xing’s curiosity:

“Another thing is what?”

“Another thing is… assuming drug traffickers have a working brain, they probably wouldn’t recruit someone who doesn’t even know how to change a tire to haul their load… right?”

The mountain roads here were rough, and blown tires were a common occurrence. The moment Shen Xing had stepped out of his car with that utterly bewildered, panic-stricken look on his face, Jiang Lin’s suspicion toward him had already dropped by more than half.

To Shen Xing’s ears… that trailing “right?” sounded slightly insulting.

“So basically, I was cleared of suspicion in your book because I was too much of a useless amateur?”

Jiang Lin quickly waved his hands:

“You’re an honorable doctor of the people—as long as you’re good at swapping out human replacement parts, it doesn’t matter whether you know how to change a car tire.”

Shen Xing was amused by his phrasing:

“So when you proactively offered to find a repair shop for me and traveled alongside me afterward… was that really just to help me out?”

Jiang Lin pressed his lips together slightly:

“Not entirely. In reality, many people transporting drugs don’t even realize they’re carrying contraband. Drug traffickers are cunning; they frequently stash drugs on other people’s vehicles—sometimes private cars, sometimes cargo trucks. Vehicle owners can’t possibly conduct a detailed inspection of every inch of their car every single time they drive to check if something extra has been attached. As a result, they often unwittingly carry drugs right out of the police’s line of sight. Once they reach the destination, these traffickers silently unload the stash from the car without the driver ever knowing.

So back then, even though I felt there was a high probability you were clean, I was still concerned that your car might have been tampered with. That’s why I kept following you along the way.”

Shen Xing was genuinely taken aback. Although he had undergone plenty of anti-drug education in school growing up, the environment in Tianjin was ultimately vastly different from Yunnan. Ordinary people almost never came into contact with such things, let alone the intricate methods of drug trafficking. He even began to wonder if his car really had been tampered with on the road:

“Was my car thoroughly inspected? Is it definitely clean?”

Jiang Lin found his reaction somewhat amusing:

“Rest assured, your car went through two full rounds of searches. Meiqiu is top-notch; if it searched your car and found nothing, then there’s definitely nothing.”

“Meiqiu? Who’s Meiqiu?”

“The police dog that inspected your car in the courtyard yesterday.”

Only then did Shen Xing remember the black German Shepherd he had seen at the county bureau yesterday:

“Wasn’t that Heibao?”

Jiang Lin guessed right away that he had mistaken the dog’s identity:

“Heibao is already retired. The one that inspected your car yesterday was Meiqiu, the county bureau’s drug detection dog. It’s also a German Shepherd.”

Shen Xing’s curiosity was piqued:

“So Heibao really is a police dog? Did you adopt a retired police dog? I’ve only read about people adopting retired police dogs online—aren’t the adoption requirements extremely strict?”

No wonder the dog had struck him as so majestic at first glance, completely different from ordinary dogs he usually saw—turns out it was an official working dog on the public payroll! Jiang Lin lowered his head, a faint shadow flickering across his eyes in an instant:

“Yeah. I knew its original handler, and since the conditions were right, I adopted it.”

Shen Xing perked up with interest:

“Whoa! No wonder it looked so cool at first sight! I have a dog too, you know—a Samoyed. He’s being shipped over on Saturday. I’ll let him meet Heibao then.”

Recalling Shen Xing’s previous voice message, Jiang Lin felt like laughing:

“I remember. Your Samoyed is afraid of thunder.”

Having cleared the air regarding the small episode on the road, Jiang Lin raised his glass once more to offer an apology:

“So… you don’t blame me anymore, right?”

Shen Xing found it a little funny—it seemed as though this man was genuinely afraid of him being angry. He lifted his own glass in return:

“How could I be that petty? Consider the page turned.”

The two heroically downed the drinks in their glasses.

It was rare to meet a fellow townsman from back home in a place like this, and once everything was out in the open, the conversation flowed freely. After Jiang Lin repeatedly praised Shen Xing’s decision to come to Yunnan for medical aid, Shen Xing interrupted him in embarrassment:

“Hold on, Hero—I’m really not as noble as you make me out to be. Truth be told, I didn’t volunteer to come here… I guess you could say I was exiled here.”

Jiang Lin didn’t quite catch his meaning:

“Exiled?”

Shen Xing let out a sigh and downed another glass of orange juice. Jiang Lin promptly refilled it for him once more.

Shen Xing began recounting the medical dispute at Yuetan Hospital sparked by the amputation case. In his tone, the indignation from a few days ago was gone, replaced by a touch of helpless resignation.

“Anyway, that’s pretty much the gist of it. I had never actually thought about serving in a border region before—it was just a twist of fate.”

Jiang Lin knitted his brows slightly. Although Shen Xing hadn’t gone into microscopic detail, Jiang Lin’s professional instincts told him that if the family had merely shown up at the hospital dressed in funeral whites to make a scene and throw slander, Shen Xing wouldn’t have ended up here:

“Did the family do something else besides making a scene at the hospital?”

Shen Xing suddenly raised his eyes, a glint of admiration flashing in his large eyes:

“As expected of a police officer! Indeed, back then, someone actually stalked me all the way to my residential complex. Doctor-patient relationships are quite tense these days—just last year, a doctor at another hospital in Tianjin got stabbed. I reported the situation to the leadership, and the hospital leaders were afraid a tragedy might happen to me. Since the hospital happened to have a quota for border aid assignments, they approved it for me just like that.”

Seeing that Jiang Lin’s brows were still furrowed, Shen Xing forced a lighthearted tone:

“Actually, it’s not a bad thing. Supporting Yunnan has its perks—it’ll look good on my resume when it comes time for promotions in the future.”

Despite his breezy words, Jiang Lin could still tell that Shen Xing hadn’t actually wanted to come—or rather, even if he had been willing, he wouldn’t have wanted to leave under such circumstances. Squeezing the glass in his hand slightly, Jiang Lin spoke up:

“Do you blame that stubborn patient who refused the amputation?”

Shen Xing stuffed a piece of meat wrap into his mouth, then leaned back against his chair. His expression turned blank for a brief moment before settling into a sense of release:

“I wouldn’t really call it ‘blame.’ Honestly, when you’ve been a doctor for a long time, it’s easy to end up on a completely different wavelength from your patients. For the vast majority of doctors, when a patient comes to the hospital, the absolute number-one priority is to save their life. If you lose your life, everything else is gone. So when facing a critical condition, doctors value life above all else.

But for patients, it’s sometimes a different story. Take this patient, for instance: even though he met the indications for amputation right upon admission and three debridement surgeries failed to yield good results, he still didn’t want to lose his leg and stubbornly refused the operation. To him, perhaps his leg wasn’t more important than his life, but it was worth gambling for—worth taking a massive risk.”

Jiang Lin kept his head slightly lowered, lost in thought over something unknown, before suddenly speaking up again:

“Do you think he was being irrational?”

Shen Xing straightened his posture once more, resting his folded hands on the table. His large, clear eyes locked onto the man sitting across from him. For some reason, Jiang Lin actually felt a slight twinge of guilt under that gaze.

“Hero, do you know what? Based on this incident alone, I could write a 30,000-word thesis titled On the Importance of Mutual Trust in Doctor-Patient Relationships.”

Jiang Lin blinked, then nodded, gesturing for him to continue.

Having kept everything bottled up for days, Shen Xing’s long-suppressed urge to vent had finally found an attentive listener:

“These days, everyone keeps saying how managing mother-in-law and daughter-in-law dynamics is a complex science. Let me tell you—compared to doctor-patient relationships, mother-in-law dynamics are piece of cake!”

Jiang Lin was amused by the comparison:

“How so?”

“With mothers and daughters-in-law, at least you’re dealing with a fixed relationship between two specific people, right? But doctor-patient relationships aren’t like that at all. You never know what kind of patient or family member you’re going to encounter. Some patients don’t come to the hospital to get treated—they come to test the doctor! When you ask if they have any symptoms, they turn around and ask you, ‘Can’t you tell just by looking?’ Excuse me?! I’m here to practice medicine, not read fortunes!”

Jiang Lin couldn’t help letting out a laugh. Shen Xing was on a roll and couldn’t stop:

“And then there are the rebellious patients. On one hand, they want the doctor to cure them; on the other hand, they refuse to trust the treatment plan given by the doctor. They constantly feel like the doctor is trying to scam them, as if coming to the hospital is like stepping into a fraud operation—their core mindset is ‘I must not trust a single word the doctor says.’ That’s the ‘Lack-of-Trust Type.’

Then there’s the exact opposite—the ‘Overly-Trusting-and-Entitled Type.’ This patient and his family belonged to this category. They felt, ‘Now that I’m at the hospital, do you really dare let me die here?’

When that patient’s liver and kidneys began to fail, the doctors in our department practically took turns telling them, ‘We can’t save the leg anymore! Amputate to save his life! Amputate to save his life!’ But guess what? Nobody believed us! Their core belief was ‘As long as I press the doctor hard enough, the doctor will find a way.’ Doctors aren’t just doctors to them—doctors are supposed to be miracle-working deities!”

Jiang Lin spoke up:

“So that patient refused the amputation because he believed his life wasn’t actually in danger?”

Shen Xing nodded:

“Exactly. Because we brought up amputation the very day he was admitted, their whole extended family assumed the doctors were suggesting it just to take the easy way out. Or maybe they thought we were trying to make extra money off the surgery fees and weren’t actually trying to treat him properly. Plus, they figured if people can survive after an amputation, how could keeping the leg possibly be life-threatening? So they never believed that saving the leg genuinely posed a threat to his life. In the end, his internal organs failed at an extraordinarily rapid pace. In less than two days, he went into acute organ failure and passed away. And after that… well, you know what happened.”

The two ate and chatted until nearly nine o’clock before finally standing up. Shen Xing walked over to the counter to settle the bill:

“That gentleman over there already settled the check.”

Shen Xing turned around, only to see Jiang Lin zipping up his jacket. Stuffed from the meal, Shen Xing leaned against the counter and called out:

“Hero, why did you sneak off to pay the bill? Didn’t we agree that it was my treat?”

“You’re calling me ‘Hero’ again. How could a hero keep letting someone else pay for his meals?”

“Heh, look at you—quite the generous hero!”