An Unexpected Night of Translating

So today was Ingress First Saturday, and we had the pleasure of being joined by two tourists from Spain.
I don't often get the chance to talk to people from abroad, so after having hours of chatting and a very pleasant dinner, I thought I could call it a day.
Well. Apparently not today.

Before heading home, I had to stop by the Hospital of Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM Hospital of Sichuan Province). As soon as I walked through security at the outpatient building, I noticed a foreign guy trying to talk to a security guard—and the conversation was very clearly going nowhere.
So I went over and asked if he spoke English and whether I could help. Turns out he's an international student at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. I'll call him Jack here.
Jack had already seen a doctor and gotten a prescription. He just had no idea what he was supposed to do next. So I took him to pay the bill and collect his medicine. Easy-peasy.
Or so I thought.

Then the pharmacy staff asked me to translate one very important detail for him: this was a topical treatment. It was NOT supposed to be taken orally.
Okay. Except what they handed him was TEN MASSIVE BAGS of traditional Chinese medicine ingredients.
And I was like... there's no way you're supposed to just slap all of this onto your knees, right?
Since Jack probably didn't know that TCM prescriptions are customized for individual patients and therefore not possible to be dispensed in their final, ready-to-use form, I asked on his behalf whether the hospital could process the medicine into some kind of paste or cream.
They checked the prescription and told me it was actually supposed to be prepared as a liquid.
But that created another problem.

With the usual method of preparing TCM, each batch would produce around 250 mL. With the amount prescribed, we'd only get five doses—but the prescription called for ten.
Nobody was quite sure how exactly the medicine was supposed to be prepared. And by this point, it was already two hours past normal clinic hours, so we had no idea whether we'd even be able to find the doctor and ask him 😅

By sheer luck, we caught him on an escalator. Cue another round of interpreting that absolutely fried my brain.
After a lot of back-and-forth, we finally figured it out: Jack was supposed to prepare the herbal liquid, use the steam to fumigate his knees first, then wait for the liquid to cool down and soak his knees in it.
It's a pretty unusual two-stage treatment, and probably not something you'd ever hear about outside a TCM hospital. Combine that with instructions complicated enough to confuse even the hospital staff, and honestly, no matter how hard Jack studies Chinese, he was doomed from the start 😂 So I'm genuinely glad I happened to be there.

And the funniest part is that the whole thing only happened because of two ridiculous coincidences.
First, I was actually supposed to pick up my own medicine yesterday. I missed it, so I had to come back today.
Second, Jack wasn't even planning to visit this hospital. He was originally heading toward Tianfu Square when he spotted a metro station named after the TCM hospital along the way and basically thought: "Oh, I've never tried that before. Why not?"
And completely by chance, he walked into one of the best TCM hospitals in China.
Then, completely by chance, I happened to walk in at exactly the right time and saw him struggling to communicate with the security guard.
Two people who weren't supposed to be there that day, somehow ending up in exactly the same place at exactly the right time.
What a night.