In a gold mine in China. Visual China|Figure
One
Another night of sweat wipes.
When I got up at night to pee, I felt dizzy for a while, and my body was propped up like a bamboo, and I lay down like a bamboo piece. Doctors say, drink plenty of water, sweat more, and get the virus out. After hanging up the liquid medicine every day, when I returned home, my son poured me water cup by cup, and I drank cup by cup, I can't remember how many glasses of water I drank and how much sweat I sweated. It's been four days like this.
On December 28, 2023, three students majoring in journalism from a university in the south came to shoot my footage, and they had an assignment design, a documentary of a small person's daily life. In the future, they will be employed in television after graduation. One of my classmates was a reader of mine when he was in high school, and he bought some of my books. Let's go to shoot the Luohe River in Lingkou. Ten or twenty years ago, my companions and I used Lingkou by the Luo River as a transit point countless times to go to the mine or return home. This is a place related to the youth and fate of a group of people, who have witnessed each other's prosperity, sorrow and joy, and how many waves on the Luo River have been photographed, and they never get tired of looking at each other.
When I woke up that morning, I felt that my throat was dry and a little painful, which was a precursor to a cold, but fortunately I didn't have a fever or cough, and judging from experience, I could still hold out for a while. Pneumoconiosis is most afraid of fever and cough, which can easily cause interstitial pneumonia, which is almost incurable and can accelerate the cause of pulmonary fibrosis and functional failure.
If you want to buy osmanthus and carry wine, it is not the same as a teenager.
People are no longer in their thirties and forties, and Luohe is no longer the Luohe of more than ten years ago. The water has become small, the riverbed is full of pebbles, large and small, and the wooden bridge has been replaced by a concrete bridge, and the people on the bank are no longer smelling chickens and dogs, but the roar of large and small motors. Every step forward in life always comes at the cost of a quiet break. People from the South Shore have moved to the North Shore, and new immigrants have sprung up. Only the clouds on the Nanluo River are still so desperately white.
As we walked up a path on the north shore, I tried to find some memories of the time when flue-cured tobacco was grown in the larger areas of the land, and the tobacco leaves on the sandy soil were of good quality, and the roasted leaves were stacked on rack carts to the purchase site, and they were covered with light yellow and yellow, like gold leaf. Some of the land in front of me has been planted with peach trees, and some have been fenced off as chicken farms, and it seems that flue-cured tobacco has not been grown for many years. After taking a few empty shots, hitting a few drifts on the waves with stone chips, we came back. That night, I lay down.
Hang three bottles of water a day for four or five hours, watching the drops of the potion flow into the blood vessels. Longing for a miracle, longing for the east wind to prevail over the west wind, but there was no response. The son sat anxiously beside him, constantly paying attention to the details. I was treated more carefully than the patients in the same room.
The owner of the small clinic is about the same age as me, he was originally a village doctor in the countryside, but there were no people in the countryside, and the clinic had no patients, so he moved to the city with urbanization. He said that one of his classmates was also a coder, and they often chatted about things, and he said that as soon as you sign up for words, I think it is you.
The clinic was overcrowded every day, there was no place to lie down, and the small stools of the needle hangers sat in rows. It is said that there are more than 100 common diseases of Chinese, and for the grassroots level, there is no doubt that the cold still carries half of the medical economy. The doctor has been a soldier, has been to many places, once determined to be a good doctor, in the small mountain village for half a life, with the loss of rural population, to be a good doctor has no hope, so he has to develop to the county seat. It can be seen that the career he is keen on is still traditional Chinese medicine, there are traditional Chinese medicine counters, physiotherapy equipment, and acupuncture points and moxibustion diagrams on the wall.
I saw that he made a lot of Chinese medicine patches, which are very large, which can be applied to a person's entire back and treat the lumbar and cervical spine, which he developed by himself. I don't know how effective it is, but there are few recipients. Migrant workers hope to be cured of illness overnight and continue to work at dawn, while housekeepers hope to see immediate results and then complete the work that cannot be done at home. For doctors with the ideal of traditional Chinese medicine, a hanging bottle pierced with a needle every day is life and the death of the ideal.
There was a middle-aged man who sat next to me every day, and when I ran out of potion, he helped him change the medicine bottle, and I often helped him change it. He was a plasterer who gave people a shave. The renovation of new houses, the renovation of old houses, from the city to the countryside, he always has endless work to do. His cold had already caused pneumonia, and his cough exploded like fried popcorn. He asked the doctor if he could get better. The doctor said, don't worry, the medicine has arrived, and the disease will be cured. He said with infinite anxiety, but he didn't dare to die, the roof was half scraped for others, and he had to be scraped for others anyway.
Two
I think of the earth-shattering cold in the winter of 1999, which was also so cold, and we all lay down halfway through the work.
This place is called Fan Cha, and in my imagination, in some years, there were many people surnamed Fan living in a fork. Nowadays, due to the rise of mining and environmental damage, the households have moved away, and a few families are left to live in the fork, open mills for alchemy, and usually grow crops and herd cattle.
My partners are two brothers, the elder brother is called Fan Baomin, and the younger brother is called Fan Baoguo. In the era when people in the city rose to take foreign names, the mountain people still continued to have simple and ideal names. We took on a job: send a roadway 500 meters to the northeast. 500 meters was delivered, and we were paid once. We have privately received information that there is a golden vein five hundred meters underground in the northeast, and at least three lanes are currently reluctant to rush here day and night. According to the rules, whoever arrives first will be the one with the golden vein.
Two wind drilling operations, two stubble guns per day, and a progress of four meters. Baoguo and I each hold a wind drill, and Baomin is a helper. Although Baomin is a few years old, his skills are not as good as his younger brother, he works as a blaster and eats technical meals. The stone is very hard, so hard that a drill bit and a hole, when the hole is opened, the knife-like alloy is hit to the bottom of the hole, and the alloy is wasted. In terminology, it is called No. 2 rock, and No. 2 rock has extremely high technical requirements for hole position. My technology is stronger than that of Baoguo, I am responsible for digging out the heart, and Baoguo is responsible for the side eye. When he worked for a month, Baoguo caught a cold, he held the nose of the machine, his body shook, and he couldn't control the machine. Because the head of the machine is shaking, the drill pipe twists like a noodle and suddenly breaks, which is extremely dangerous. At the end of the day, Baoguo said, I can't stand anymore. I said, I'll take care of the rest. I took care of the rest and finished the blasting. Bao Guo said, I can't get out. I said, I'll pull you out. We found a frame car, and Baomin and I dragged him out. Baoguo was a little tall, the carriage was a little short, and his two legs were flung outside the carriage, not like his, like superfluous.
There is no pharmacy in the mine, so the boss bought a cold pass from the mountain, a whole cardboard box, and a carton of instant noodles. The red pills are as red as red beans. The shed was ventilated on all sides, and we went to work and pressed all the quilts on Baoguo. Before going to work, I fed Baoguo a cold pass, and after work, I fed him a cold pass again, twelve pills each time.
Two days later, I also caught a cold. On that day, I was still in charge of digging out the heart holes, and Baomin was in charge of the side holes. Two machines with two people, without helpers, the efficiency is low. The hole followed the pole of the first hole, and I saw that the pole kept shaking, and the drill pipe I controlled could not be equidistant and parallel to it, and by the fifth hole, they were interpenetrating. Baomin said, master, it's not the benchmark that is shaking, it's your body shaking. We worked for ten hours, dealt with the aftermath, and I said, "Baomin, you pull me out." Baomin found a rack car and loaded me in the car. He pulled the car, not daring to be fast or slow. I saw that the air ducts and cables on the walls of the cave kept retreating, retreating, retreating, until there was no way to retreat, and the wooden sticks that were used as foundation piles occasionally grew white flowers, which were not many living creatures, and they were very vivid.
This is really a protracted and earth-shattering cold. The three of us lay in bed for eight days, and the cook brought us hot meals three times a day, sometimes with us and sometimes without. Heavy snow fell outside the shed in Qinling for eight days. The snow is sometimes slow, sometimes stormy, and the bare cliffs on the opposite side rise into the sky, sometimes shaking, sometimes static. The crow flies high in the sky, screaming because there is no food.
On the eighth day, we finished eating a box of cold passes, and we were finally able to get up. The ballast worker said, "We haven't worked for eight days." The cook said it would be nice to be alive.
Our alley didn't outperform the others, and when we arrived that day, it was an empty stope, the floor was washed with water, and it was only ten days late for the meeting of the golden vein, and the other alley was rumbling with cannons, and it was on the way to it.
The boss went bankrupt, stopped work and production, and had no money to pay us for wages. And he said, Which of you will take the little lyre. Xiaoqin is his lover, and she is still a girl, good-looking, weak, and everything else, but her face is a little long, and her money is a little smooth. Baomin and I are both married, only Baoguo is single, and Xiaoqin follows Baoguo. Baoguo is soft-hearted, and if she refuses, Xiaoqin will be homeless.
A year later, Xiaoqin and Baoguo had a daughter. Baoguo was overjoyed, called and asked me to name my daughter, I looked through the dictionary for two days, but I didn't get it right, Baomin called again, saying that Xiaoqin had chosen a good name for her daughter, called Fan Hua. It's just confusing that this name is whether I hope that my daughter will be like a flower in this life, or whether I dream that I will be as fierce as a female general Fan Lihua in this life.
Three
If you hang up the needle for another day today, there is a high probability that the illness should turn back.
I live so carefully and worryingly because there is not much room left to squander, whether it is from the dimension of time or the dimension of the body. Every cold is an accelerator.
I remember that when my grandfather was alive, he often said: Illness is a touchstone, and it has to test people's lives. Grandpa has studied a little medicine and understands a little pathology, but his medical skills are much inferior to his Xiaokai. Is a cold a touchstone, and how can a patient distinguish between life and death with the color of the signature on it? Probably only the doctor and the heavens can tell, but I have really seen and used the touchstone for identifying gold, and I have used it very skillfully, but I have not seen gold for many years, and in this life, there is probably no chance to test gold.
Hi Nian
Editor-in-charge: Xing Renyan