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Hospital staff decipher heartfelt letter

By Cao Zinan| chinadaily.com.cn| Updated: August 5, 2022 L M S

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The thank you note written by the patient in his 90s. [Photo from web]

A head nurse together with her colleagues recently cracked a letter of illegible writing at a hospital in Zhejiang. The thank you letter was written by a patient in his 90's.

"The elderly, surnamed Zhang, shakes his hand badly when he writes," said Liu Mingchen, the head nurse at the the infectious disease department at the Zhejiang Provincial People's Hospital. "Fortunately, we often chatted with him and know him well. So we understood the full text and got what he tried to say."

"We all felt very touched," Liu said.

According to her, Zhang had a high fever with over 38 degrees, which had lasted a week before he was admitted here. This was not the first time he was a patient at the hospital.

"The hospital treated him when he had brain infarction, so in his heart this hospital was a blessed place as his life was once saved here," said Liu.

Liu and her colleagues view Zhang as an interesting and respectable person.

"Every day he would sit up and read the newspaper carefully with his glasses," said Liu. "He is very outgoing. Whenever he saw me coming to the ward, he would chat with me and tell me about some of his own experiences."

After a week of treatment, Zhang's condition greatly improved. Before he was discharged from the hospital, he went to Liu with the piece of paper.

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The patient in the hospital. [Photo from web]

"The words on the paper were so dense and a little crooked that I really didn't understand at first," said Liu.

Liu Mingchen said that Zhang also knew that his writing was a little illegible, so he was very embarrassed to explain that this is a thank you letter that he had written before he left the hospital, and wanted to use it to express his gratitude for the medical workers here.

Liu accepted the letter happily and passed it onto the department's group chat, so that they could make clear what Zhang was trying to say.

"We only read for about more than 10 minutes, and then we managed to decipher the writing," Liu said with a big smile.

In the letter, the patient wrote, "This is my sixth time staying at this hospital…Every time I'm here, I see something new. The doctors and nurses here are always so nice to me."

Liu said she and her colleagues will keep the special thank you note.

"The man always forgets what day it is, but he remembers clearly the warmth the hospital and our department bring him," said Liu, "That is the greatest motivation for the work we do."

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