Chapter 59: Dawn

Tan Mo leaves, and Qiao Lan sits on the sofa, wrapped in a thin blanket that was not there before she went to bed last night.

Where Tan Mo had gone and what she was doing, Qiao Lan didn't know, but whether it was an illusion or not, she seemed to sense a sense of determination and conviction in Tan Mo.

The holidays passed quickly and Tan Mo still did not come to school when school resumed.

From the beginning of last term when the students were surprised that Tan Mo was not here, to the beginning of the new term when they still did not see Tan Mo, they have started to get used to it.

Qiao Lan's table was replaced by a boy who was not very close to Qiao Lan and who was at the top of his class.

This boy is a bit like Pei Ning, not in terms of looks, but in terms of personality and achievements. He is a bit introverted, and was even a bit shy when he first sat at the table with Qiao Lan, but gradually opened up.

The class teacher liked this student so much that she put him next to Qiao Lan, probably because she wanted Qiao Lan to have time to help him with his English.

Qiao Lan is so used to Tan Mo sitting next to her that she sometimes turns her head to think about a problem she doesn't know, only to remember that Tan Mo is no longer sitting next to her.

The new table is very nice, but Qiao Lan can't help but miss sitting with Tan Mo, listening to songs with headphones on and passing notes together.

Qiao Lan worked harder than ever, studying so hard that Bai Yu was scared.

With Tan Mo gone, Qiao Lan has secured the top spot in her year after several exams and no one can shake her.

Someone laughed and said it was a shame Tan Mo wasn't there.

Tan Mo has been gone for a long time and everyone seems to have forgotten the insults they once hurled at him and at Qiao Lan, and most of his classmates speak of Tan Mo only in terms of how they once knew such a genius.

Someone in the class was playing Zhihu and someone asked what it was like to have a genius classmate, and someone in the class wrote a whole bunch of words, all of which were nothing but praise and no insults.

In our free time we talk about the day and the future, like graduation, like university.

Hao Ying asks Qiao Lan what university she wants to go to in the future.

Qiao Lan once refused Hao Ying, who later understood what Qiao Lan meant, but was still not convinced.

Having seen such a beautiful and talented girl, it was hard to look at anyone else, and Hao Ying did not blame Qiao Lan, as he experienced rejection for the first time in his life, and finally learned how to look at girls who had liked him with an equal eye.

Hao Ying has changed a lot, her studies have improved a lot and her personality is much more restrained.

Keep your distance and Qiao Lan will only be friends, and Qiao Lan will not even agree to this.

Qiao Lan casually mentions the highest school in the country today, where she has to go because she needs a large sum of money.

Qiao Lan was at the top of her grade and she was perfectly qualified to say that, but Hao Ying rubbed his face with sadness.

"So what do you want to major in?"

This time it was someone else who asked.

"Finance, I think," Qiao Lan says as she writes her paper, not really thinking about it, but just being asked about it, she casually answers what she used to study.

She actually thought about another profession once before because Tan Mo.

But it's just a thought, after all, it's still early for the entrance exams.

Finance was no longer her most desired field of study, but Qiao Lan didn't explain this to the crowd, and when she was in bed at the end of the day, Qiao Lan picked up her phone and sent Tan Mo her usual goodnight message.

As usual, Tan Mo did not write back, and Tan Mo's replies were usually at 3 or 4 in the morning, which is 3 or 4 in the afternoon in New York.

Very regular.

Tan Mo finished his day of rehab and was as weak as if he had been pulled out of the water, so weak that he had no strength to lift his arms.

Ouch.

When Tan Mo was involved in a car accident, he thought that his broken legs were the most painful he had ever felt in his life, but it was only after he started rehab that Tan Mo realised that the pain of broken bones was nothing.

The hospital in New York stayed with him and said that Tan Mo's leg could be treated, but that it would be very, very hard.

The surgery to repair the crushed patella was repeated, re-cracking the muscles and bones that had healed but had grown crooked, and then operating again. After the anesthetic wore off, Tan Mo's legs, which hadn't felt anything for a year and a half, began to ache, bones, nerves, muscles, nothing good.

I was too afraid to move my legs, so after the operation I was left with severe stiffness in my legs, my knees were badly bent, the wounds were hot and painful, I put ice packs on them every day to stop the pain and swelling, and it felt like the wounds were tearing over and over again.

Tan Mo's pain is far more sensitive than normal because of his AS. Sometimes the pain is so severe that he goes into shock and faints when no medication works.

When he woke up, Tan Mo looked out of the window at the stars and felt like he had walked through hell.

The first time he landed on his leg, it instantly turned black and purple, as if he had been run over again by a wheel.

The pain can sometimes be disorienting, but in a moment of clarity, Tan Mo's heart swells with joy like no other.

It hurt, but it was the first time he had stood on the ground with his feet in two years.

He wanted to try to take a few steps and was ordered to stop by the doctor, who told him to take one step at a time.

And this step by step is the real beginning of rehab, the beginning of bending rehab.

There is no way to bend the leg at all, and rehab is about getting the leg to bend little by little, starting with a little bit of leg padding, passively creating an angle, and then moving on to what is commonly known as leg breaking at the back.

And so it goes, day by day, over and over again.

Because it hurts so much, the continuous rehab movements may cause the patient to go into shock again, and if you are not careful, the muscles that have only just grown will tear again.

The mornings always start with the legs plastered with various testing machines, and then the days of pressing and straightening and bending begin, with Tan Mo feeling as if the bones are misaligned, disassembling and reassembling them every day, the muscles on the outside fearfully maintaining the stretching and tearing.

Tan Mo was in a single ward and in the next ward was a young man in his twenties who had also been admitted to this hospital after a car accident.

He was brought in immediately after the accident, to a far lesser extent than Tan Mo, but at the start of each day's rehab, everyone could still hear his heartbreaking cries of pain through the walls.

Tan Mo's rehabilitation was even harder than his, but throughout, Tan Mo never cried or cried out in pain.

He always gritted his teeth and gripped the sheets of his hospital bed with both hands, occasionally muffling a grunt when the pain became too much, and then nothing else.

But by the time the daily rehab was over, his clenched teeth were so painful that he couldn't eat, the sheets he was gripping with both hands had long since been torn through, his body was soaked with cold sweat over and over again, and his whole body no longer had a shred of strength.

After a night's rest, it was the same repetition the next day.

Tan Mo was one of the first to come into the hospital, and he stayed until the end of the day, when the pain of rehabilitation became too much for him.

After two months of post-operative rest and 80 days of rehabilitation, Tan Mo gritted his teeth and persevered. When he could finally bend his legs to 30 degrees, a patient who couldn't hold on asked him how he could still hold on.

Tan Mo spoke after a long silence, "Because someone is waiting for me to get back on my feet."

"Very important people?"

"The most important person."

The teenager's face was pale and he was already tired at the end of the day's rehab, but he was still practising walking with his crutches.

When he first came here, the doctors said he was too weak to withstand the pain and exertion of rehabilitation, but he gritted his teeth and held on for the rest of his life.

And it went to the end.

Seeing the light.