A man

Let’s start at the end of March, set off for Anhui, stayed for a day or two, then returned home and unfortunately contracted a cough on the train, and the rest was the beginning of the misery.

Sore throat, started coughing, obviously infected, test strips showed positive, then started quarantine, medication, not much effect, violent coughing, very painful, biting.

After insisting for a few days, Mum took two days’ worth of medication from a small clinic in her hometown and had it brought to me. At first, I didn’t dare to take it because of the side effects of the tablets, but the effect was still very good, and after a day of taking it, I basically didn’t cough any more.

The aftermath of the cough, is my pneumothorax, due to coughing harder, coughing up the lung alveoli should be. Then there was uninterrupted heart and chest discomfort, during which I took oxygen and then jogged to try to recover in a hurry.

But the bitter truth is that it’s been almost two months and it’s still not fully healed, which is sad.

There’s also some sadness in the form of my mum’s terminal liver cancer and my son’s relatively poor school grades, so alas, it’s hard to be cheered up.

Maybe, that’s just the way life is. It’s not easy to be middle-aged, only you know that, give yourself the courage to face life and any good or bad things that may happen.

An old client in Chengdu asked me to meet up to talk about something, so I bought a plane ticket and went. There was no hope and not much disappointment. Good things come in small packages, no rush.

On the second day, I went to Zhongjiang, Sichuan to meet a very familiar friend. We have been in touch by phone for almost 17 years, but we have never had the chance to meet each other, so this time I took the opportunity of going to Chengdu to go to my friend’s place. It was a very familiar feeling. Although I had not seen him before, there was no sense of strangeness.

On the third day, I went to Xi’an to meet an old brother. At night the train sleeper home.