After Years on the Cancer Front Line, I Became Depressed

I never imagined that one day I would become depressed.

I was a born optimist; my older brother once called me a blind optimist, which shows how sunny my outlook was when young.

But now I must admit: I am depressed.

The enormous workload means my study and working hours are nearly twice those of an ordinary person.

Physically and mentally I have long been overdrawn. The more patients I treat, the more there are—too many to handle—and many of them ask me countless questions every day, drawing from me the courage and hope to go on living.

As word of mouth spreads, tens of thousands of patients come to me each year.

Sometimes, thinking of myself five or ten years from now, surrounded by ever more patients and families as my influence grows, I feel terrified.

Nearly all those I treat are terminal cancer patients; I see only a handful of early or mid-stage cases a year.

Lacking religious faith, Chinese people generally fear death. The cultural tradition of filial piety makes most Chinese irrational when faced with a serious illness like cancer; they always have excessively high expectations, and every seeker brings enormous psychological pressure on us cancer doctors.

On March 8 this year, I saw the news that Dr. Thomas Earl Starzl, the "father of liver transplantation," had died at his home in Pittsburgh. I also read that, in his autobiography, he said he hated surgery: eight months after performing a liver transplant on a patient, that patient died, and Dr. Starzl never operated again. He said he felt terrifying dread before every operation.

Reading this news, I felt a deep kinship.

I have sent off too many patients. In my WeChat Moments, what I see most is fundraising appeals for cancer treatment and the obituaries posted by patients' families. There are braggart medical charlatans who always love to boast that they cure terminal cancer handily, but I have yet to meet such a saint in real life.

And there are many seekers I cannot satisfy, who angrily hurl curses at me. They have never paid a cent in consultation fees, yet love to morally hijack doctors, believing that since we studied medicine we ought to be noble, sympathetic, and selflessly helpful.

Because I have a certain influence in anti-cancer circles, sometimes hundreds of people consult me in a single day; I could not answer them all even without eating or sleeping.

Most patients and families do not understand the workflow by which a doctor must see the patient in person to give proper advice. They impatiently expect me, with miraculous hands and a benevolent heart, to instantly relieve their own or their loved ones' dire straits without even meeting them. Sadly, I am just an ordinary person, not a god.

Once, at a patient's family's invitation, I went to Guilin to see a patient. The daughter of another patient saw me and told me she had not yet seen negative reviews of me online. I thought: that is only because the time has not yet come. As more patients and families seek me out, a deluge of abuse will come sooner or later, because my ability is limited and I cannot satisfy everyone's expectations.

Every day I face the world's most desperate people—those who, or whose loved ones, are tormented by terminal cancer. Anxious patients and families pour out their inner suffering on us, and some even vent their repression through extreme behavior toward us healers.

All of this inevitably affects me.

I cannot even take a proper holiday. Three hundred and sixty-five days a year, I do not have a single day of real rest. Even when I finally carve out a day to travel with my family, my phone keeps ringing along the way, and my brain must keep working to solve their problems as they come up.

I often have to interrupt my vacation plans and return to work early.

Even so, I must constantly face the reality that my treatment has not worked and the patient is progressing. Often I get phone calls from families of dying patients, frantically seeking help, their voices full of anxiety, grief, and despair.

I must endure one defeat after another; each leaves a shadow on my heart. Over time, these shadows multiply, and I have even begun to doubt whether my life choice was right.

Every time a patient fails to respond to my treatment and progresses, I feel guilty from the bottom of my heart. But medicine is full of uncertainty; treating terminal cancer, in particular, is mostly failure with little success.

Some of my physician colleagues never dare touch major diseases like terminal cancer, because it is a field reeking of death.

We are not like doctors who treat the occasional terminal cancer patient. As someone who specifically studies cancer treatment, I fear I will spend my whole life exhausted, with no peace.

Patients also often tell me, tearfully, that they are already destitute from paying for treatment. After hearing it so often, the moment someone begins telling me, I instinctively want to escape.

No one is strong enough to face such a desperate group every day. Listening to the sorrows of these unlucky people, waves of suicidal thoughts sweep through my mind; perhaps only death can end this kind of life. It is not that I lack sympathy; I truly want to flee these petitioners now.

I need to adjust myself. I need to drastically reduce my burden. My life needs some sunlight.

There are always patients who tell me I am their last hope, that I must save them.

As flesh-and-blood, sentient beings, I cannot face these over-expectant patients and families, so often I choose to decline, because I do not want to live in a lie. Unpleasant scenes of parting and death are best experienced as seldom as possible.

Some families hope I will help them conceal the truth from their loved ones. I understand their motives, but I am unwilling to take part in such deception, well-meant or not.

At home I have become less and less talkative, losing my enthusiasm for life and even the passion for writing and reading that I have kept for over twenty years. Things that once felt wonderful—growing flowers and grass—now leave me cold.

As a medical person, I know these are symptoms of depression.

Being a doctor is hard; being one in China is harder; being one who satisfies tens of thousands of patients and families in China is harder still.

Years of overwork have given me many chronic illnesses. Constantly rushing to rescue critically ill patients has broken my own body.

What is worse, once a person has built up a little reputation in medicine, he can never really get out.

I have tried several times to leave medicine, but I cannot help myself. Wherever I go, whatever I change to do, admirers who have heard of me can find me—short of my death.

Across the world, doctors are a high-risk group for depression and one of the groups with the highest suicide rates. I used to feel nothing for these statistics, because my life had not yet gathered so much gloom.

Now I must admit that I myself am one of the many doctors sinking into depression.

I will work hard to adjust myself and continue using what I have learned to help patients. I also hope that this article will not be read by my relatives and friends later as a suicide note. I still hope to keep accompanying my child as he grows up healthy, and to spend the rest of my life with those I love.

But I hope my patients and their families, in your moments of utmost anxiety, will put yourselves in my place and restrain your emotions a little.

Because the pressure borne by me and by many of my colleagues is unimaginable.