As If Facing an Abyss, As If Treading on Thin Ice, As If Bearing a Mountain on One's Head
The child and his mother left yesterday for their hometown to spend the Spring Festival; I am staying in Beijing alone. I went to bed at 8:30 last night and slept straight through until 5:30 this morning, without waking once in between—thank heavens, no phone disturbed me last night. My phone was offline, so I received no WeChat messages either.Beijing winter heating makes the house air dry; I turned on a humidifier, and the room became somewhat moister and more comfortable. This is the best-rested day I have had since I caught COVID. Falling asleep naturally and waking naturally, I felt my whole state much improved on waking.After China dropped its pandemic controls, the number of patients surged for a while, and many doctors experienced the most unbelievable moments of their lives. I live in this age, have learned some medicine (though, being dull-witted, my level is not high), and have tens of thousands of readers and four or five thousand WeChat friends; so I should not expect any leisure time.Since catching COVID and developing complications, I have not taken time off work except for that large half-day when I could not move; the rest of the time I have been caring for my family and working. COVID has actually affected my body too; especially recently, I can feel that the virus has left me weaker than before.Recently, if I work too long without a break, I get palpitations and need to blow some hot air and catch up on sleep to relieve them. Yet recently, working from five or six in the morning to nine or ten at night has been the norm. There are just too many patients of every kind; I have to think of every way to cut my workload. Some patients with milder, other diseases who want to see me have been turned away. I know their illnesses also need treatment, but I also need rest. No one is made of iron. It is not that we lack sympathy for patients; it is that we ourselves cannot hold on.My classmate in Australia and my friend working in the Anguo medicinal-materials market in Hebei both caught COVID before the controls were dropped. They both told me that at first one does not realize one's stamina has declined, but in the second month one clearly notices that one tires more easily than before.After the virus enters the body, it may have made some epigenetic changes to our genes; such changes need time to accumulate before symptoms appear. So strictly speaking, these late-appearing symptoms should not be called long-COVID sequelae, but rather the medium- and long-term symptoms of the disease COVID.But the human body is also very intelligent; it can self-adjust to adapt to environmental changes. One of the greatest features of living things is adaptation to environmental change. When we encounter a threat or damage, after a while we adapt to it, so there is no need to panic.We used to know little about this disease; a while back everyone happily thought that once the worst symptoms were gone, one was recovered and cured. In fact the course of this disease is quite long; fever and body pain are only the initial symptoms. I asked a few friends in their twenties; they too say they now feel weaker than before. They were infected more than a month ago, and the weakness has gradually appeared; so it is not only middle-aged and elderly people who become weak from this disease—young people do too.A large Israeli study recently showed that weakness and similar problems caused by COVID basically resolve after one year. This shows that our bodies can fully adapt to the virus in about a year; many people may need a full year to fully recover.It is just that repeated infection will become the norm from now on. What will be the effect of repeated infection on the body? And will this virus cause long-term harm—for example, carcinogenicity or other side effects like EBV and Helicobacter pylori? There is little research on these questions yet; after all, humankind has only dealt with it for three years.But theoretically, if a virus requires our immune system to spend this long on self-repair, it could cause B-cell and T-cell proliferative disease—that is, what we commonly call lymphoma. Such speculation needs time to verify; more comprehensive research on COVID will take decades to produce.My greatest feeling recently is that I have been so busy as to be almost numb. There are still many long-COVID patients; I hear that on current Spring Festival travel trains, coughing rises and falls and few passengers are without it. Hospitals have no good way to handle long COVID, and many people are turning to TCM.There is a high probability of a second wave of epidemic between Spring Festival and the Qingming Festival; although its scale will not be as large, its impact will still be considerable. Young people will be fine on reinfection, but the elderly and some immunocompromised patients have not yet fully recovered from the first infection; if they are infected again, the situation may not be good.So I do not hold out much hope of returning to normal life within the next year, unless I desert and stop practicing medicine. Since the pandemic began, doctors and nurses in Europe and America have repeatedly taken to the streets to protest that their workload is too heavy relative to their pay. Many doctors and nurses have fled the medical profession because they could not bear the pressure—this shows how great the pressure on the medical profession is.After the COVID shock, medical problems have indeed become much thornier than before. Many patients are in life-threatening condition, which has greatly raised the psychological pressure on doctors. After all, human life is at stake; any doctor who takes on a life-threatening patient dares not be careless. When a patient dies, it is hard to explain to the family—that is only human.These days I often feel as if I were facing an abyss, treading on thin ice, bearing a mountain on my head. I have had to set up layer after layer of barriers to turn away the many people seeking help, because my energy and ability are truly limited. But sometimes my heart really will not allow it; we kick the ball to other doctors, and other doctors kick it back. Many patients thus helplessly go home with their pain, receiving no medical relief, leaving everything to fate. Perhaps they will self-recover, perhaps not; but the suffering of illness they must endure.I also understand that after three years of pandemic shock, most families' incomes have been greatly affected. Now not only can doctors not keep up with so many patients (and there is no particularly effective treatment), there is also the situation of patients' families unable to afford treatment. But faced with this situation, we truly can only feel empty resentment. Before the torrent of the times, the tiny individual is like a mote of dust, with very limited power.Readers keep sending me messages telling me that some of the treatments I recommended have relieved the suffering of themselves, their families, and their friends; this gives me some comfort. Working and writing while ill is exhausting; my workload is far greater than that of an ordinary doctor—at least 90% of doctors do not have to write an article after a day's work. But if this hard work can benefit more people, so that the social benefit of my practice exceeds that of clinical work alone, then the labor has not been in vain. In this life, one must do something of value for the public, so as not to have wasted one's time.My recent articles may contain quite a few grammatical errors and typos; I am too rushed to check them carefully. The workload is too heavy to cover everything; I am truly sorry, and please friends who are not in need disturb me as little as possible.