Chapter 3 — The One Who Keeps The Venom Saves People

The provincial hospital's switchboard was switched three times before Du reached the person on duty who was competent to answer questions about the biological product stockpile. The operator's voice sounded tired, perhaps having gone through many similar calls tonight.

"Wait for the line, I'll connect you to the Pharmacy department."

Waiting music rang out, a repetitive piece of instrumental music, sounding out of place amid the tense atmosphere in the meeting room. Thanh stood next to him, arms crossed over his chest, eyes looking at the map full of red dots as if trying to remember which areas had not been inspected.

"Hello, Pharmacy department." A female voice, much calmer than the operator's voice.

"Hello, I'm Trinh Mien Du, technician at Khe Lanh Snake Farm. We have a case of severe Viper Bite at Son Trach district hospital. We need fresh frozen plasma to supplement blood clotting factors, because the district warehouse does not have it available. Can you transfer it?"

"Wait for me to check." A few seconds of silence, the clicking sound of keyboard typing. "We currently have twelve units of fresh frozen plasma, but I have to ask for Dr. Khang's opinion before being transferred out of the hospital, because tonight I also have two cases of severe bleeding being transfused, and one obstetric case of postpartum hemorrhage."

"I understand. So can I talk directly to Dr. Khang?"

"Let me change the phone, please wait a moment."

Another silence, this time shorter. Then a male voice rang out, slowly, somewhat alertly.

"It's Khang. Please tell me the situation."

Du presented everything again - the number of cases recorded during the week, baby Nhi's condition, the fact that polyvalent serum was not enough, and the need for fresh frozen plasma to supplement clotting factors while waiting for the specific serum to take effect.

"Miss Du, I understand your situation." Khang spoke, his voice not harsh, but with an unwavering certainty. "But I have to tell you the truth. The provincial hospital tonight has two patients with severe gastrointestinal bleeding, one pregnant woman with hemorrhaging, plus four other snakebite cases from three neighboring districts who called to ask for the same support as you in the past two hours. My current warehouse of fresh frozen plasma is only enough for about a day and a half if used at the normal rate. The Department of Health's regulations for coordinating blood and blood products at different levels require us to keep a minimum of forty percent in reserve for in-hospital cases that arise from stroke. out, because we are the last line in the whole area. If I give away twelve units right now, I'm not sure there will be enough for the bleeding case in the operating room right now."

"I'm not asking for all twelve units." Du said, trying to keep her voice calm even as her heart beat faster. "Only four units are needed for one case, more may be needed if the situation continues. Seven-year-old child, blood clotting has not improved for eight hours straight."

"I believe you." Khang said, his voice lowered a bit, no longer defensive like the previous sentence. "I was on duty in the Resuscitation Department for ten years before transferring to management. I know how dangerous a case of prolonged coagulation disorders is, you don't need to convince me of that. But imagine for me - if tonight I give you four units, tomorrow another case of snake bite from the next district calls, where can I get it to give it when the inventory is only half of the safety standard? I don't get to choose who to save and who to leave over the phone at twelve o'clock at night, Ms. Du. I only have the process. to hang on to, and that process exists because there have been nights when people gave away all their emotional reserves, and then the next morning there was an on-site emergency with nothing left to use."

Du remained silent, not because she ran out of words, but because she realized that argument had no gaps to refute with emotions. It could only be repackaged with something else — data, numbers, a specific commitment to offsets that she didn't have in hand right now.

"I understand the level of urgency, Ms. Du. But I also have responsibility for the patients lying before me right now. If you have an official written request from Son Trach district hospital, with a specific diagnosis and prognosis, I will submit it to the hospital leadership for consideration in accordance with emergency coordination procedures. But I cannot arbitrarily give away a third of the stock just over the phone, there is no guarantee that tomorrow there will not be a more serious case here."

Du was silent for a beat. She understood that logic — not because he was cold, but because he was standing between two scales, and on either side there was a real life waiting.

"Then I will let Son Trach hospital send the document tonight." she said. "But I hope the doctor understands, every hour that passes is an hour that the baby's risk of internal bleeding increases. Documents can take time to prepare and sign, and babies don't have that much time."

"I will tell the Pharmacy department to prepare it, so that when the document arrives, it can be processed immediately, without waiting for any other procedures. That's what I can do right now." Khang stopped for a second. "As for the Mist-Scaled Vipers specific serum, we don't have it in our reserve list. This is a rare species. I honestly don't know if there is any stock in the area."

"We're handling that part ourselves." Du said. "Thank you doctor for your time."

She hung up, placing the phone on the table a little harder than she intended. Thanh looked at her and knew the result without asking.

"He's not wrong." Du said, her voice sounding more tired than she realized. "He was just doing the right thing for the people lying before his eyes. The problem is that baby Nhi was not lying before his eyes."

"Call Thu and tell Son Trach to prepare the document immediately." Thanh said. "In the meantime, we still have to figure out a proactive plan — we can't rely entirely on the upline."

Du nodded, opened the V-NEBULA file again, and turned to the page with a map of the distribution of locations where Mist-Scaled Vipers had been caught in the past eight years. Most were concentrated in the low mountains west of Bau Nghe commune, where there were many limestone caves and small streams — but in the last three weeks, new reported points had gradually moved east, toward the deepest flooded lowlands this season.

"The water flooded all the caves in the mountain." She said, almost to herself. "It's being pushed down, just as I expected."

Her finger stopped at a point on the map, a small circle marked with a worn pencil, the drawing faded over the years but she still recognized it immediately - that area was located close to the bank of the Lam Tri River, around the corner behind her family's old house, where her grandfather Ninh Vien Tuyen once took her along the rocky shore looking for snake traces when she was a ten-year-old child, her hand still wrapped in bandages that had not yet been removed.

She remembered his voice, slow and deep, every time he stopped next to a wet stone: "Look carefully here. Mist-Scaled Vipers do not crawl carelessly like ordinary snakes. They like to lie in shade, near water but not submerged, and they do not attack unless you block their path."

That lesson has saved her countless times in her career. But tonight, the faint pencil circle on the map pulled her back to another memory, a memory she always kept hidden in the deepest corner, just waiting for an opportunity like this to surface - the sound of the Lam Tri River roaring in the rainy night, the sound of her father calling to the shore before disappearing in the black water, and the cold feeling of the bite on her ankle when she was nine years old, a cold that no blanket in the house was warm enough to chase away.

She remembered sitting huddled on a wooden board, her feet wrapped in three layers of cloth, listening to her mother cry bitterly on the porch while her neighbor rowed a canoe to spread the word around the neighborhood looking for anyone with the serum. The house did not have a phone, the commune health station only had two old bottles of polyvalent serum that were almost expired, injections don't help. They told her they had to take her across the river to the next district to get enough medicine, but that night the floodwaters rose faster than ever, and no one dared to row the ferry across. Her father, then in his early thirties, waded down to the wharf himself and said exactly one sentence to her mother before disappearing into the rain: swimming to the other side and asking an acquaintance to take him by motorboat would be faster than waiting for dawn. He never made it to the other shore. His body was found three kilometers downstream from the wharf, two days after the water receded.

She survived, but not because of that night's trip — the serum eventually reached her because a provincial rescue team happened to pass by, carrying a supply of flood prevention drugs. Half a day later, the medical station doctor said, she probably wouldn't have survived. For twenty-four years, Du never told this story to anyone other than Thanh and her grandfather, and every time it was mentioned, she always wondered if that day there had been some network, some place that knew in advance to prepare, would her father still had to go down to the riverbank in the middle of a rainy night?

"Du." Thanh called, pulling her back to the present. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine." She closed the file, even though her hands were still shaking a bit. "The area suspected of having the highest density of Mist-Scaled Vipers is now located close to the Lam Tri River, passing through old Bau Nghe. That is also the area that is flooded the deepest."

Thanh looked at her for a long moment, his eyes not that of a director who was calculating logistics, but of someone who had known her long enough to understand what she had just said about the name of a place.

"Are you sure you want to go in there?" He asked, his voice lighter.

Du did not answer immediately. She looked out the conference room window, where the rain was still falling non-stop, and in her head, the sound of the river was still flowing, never stopping for the past twenty-four years.