A Different Kind of Feeling: The Inner Journey of a Cancer Patient's Son
Few memories of my childhood stay vivid, but I have always remembered the painful way my mother would vomit up acid water on the threshold at dinnertime. My mother's stomach illness went back a long way. My grandmother had borne many children, and in the great famine years my mother had gone hungry more than once, which left her with this ailment.
When I was small I always hoped to grow up to be a doctor and cure my mother's illness. Rural life was very poor; my mother's stomach ailment needed long-term treatment, but she could never keep it up, always scrimping and saving to send the children to school. A parent's love is pitiable: when my mother cooked something good, she would let us children eat our fill first and only then allow herself some soup. Thinking of these past things, I cannot help bursting into tears. A loving mother's heart shows the greatest beauty of human nature in this world.
My father knew a little of folk herbal medicine, but only a little; now and then he treated people for a few acute dread diseases with wild herbs, with rather miraculous results. But he had no ability to treat my mother's stomach illness. When our circumstances improved a little and her illness worsened enough to disrupt daily life, my parents would go to various hospitals seeking treatment. The results were, of course, unsatisfactory; she was never cured. My mother still vomited acid water as always, living in pain.
When I entered junior high I went to a boarding school. In my third year, my parents went to the county town next door to run a small business, returning only at harvest time. Mother and son were thus separated. My mother missed her two sons terribly, often lying awake at night from longing; a mother's love for her young can go that far. I, for my part, worried about my mother's health and about her relationship with my father, who had a bad temper and often raged at her.
When it came time to fill out my college entrance preferences, I unhesitatingly listed a string of medical universities. But fate played me a cruel joke: I was not admitted to a medical university, and was reassigned to an engineering university, majoring in mechanical engineering and automation. That year my father's business failed; my older brother was studying at Tongji University in Shanghai; the Yangtze floods submerged the crops back home; the family burden was heavy. But the engineering university that admitted me was also a key national university; after thinking it over, I chose to submit to fate's arrangement.
Once at university, I skipped every class I could, borrowed piles of medical books from the library, and studied on my own in the dorm—not a little to the disapproval of the teachers who did dorm inspections. Because I carried a sense of unrecognized talent, I often complained among my classmates and criticized my school. Somehow these complaints reached the counselor and the college leadership, and my relationship with the school became awkward. At the time I always felt this school was not my ideal destination and that studying there was wasting my money and youth; I managed, as a student from a disaster area, to get the school to waive my tuition.
In less than half a year I was out of the university. The teachers and school leadership were very kind; they did not hold my various misdeeds against me and kept my student status for three years, until it exceeded the maximum allowed. The teachers hoped that after I felt better I would go back and get my diploma—after all, in Chinese society, a graduation certificate from a key university still counts for something. My father even threatened to sever the father-son relationship to force me back to school, and told all our relatives that if I did not return to study, none of them was to support me financially, or he would turn on them.
Those years were actually very hard for me. Though I briefly returned to school for a month or two to appease my parents, I finally could not bear this absurd life. With the attitude of "though ten thousand stand against it, I shall go," I came to Beijing. For most of that time I rented a room near the National Library, supporting myself by occasionally writing and doing small software-development jobs, and spent the rest of the time immersed in reading at the National Library. Gradually the way I made a living changed, but my basic rhythm of life and my self-study did not; this lasted from 1999 until today.
During this period my older brother and my cousin helped me financially, and I also borrowed money from alumni to start a business. In the early years life was unsettled and drifting; at New Year I would be alone in my Beijing rented room, listening to firecrackers going off outside, thinking of my loving mother back home, and weeping bitterly—while the whole city rejoiced, I alone wept in a corner. In those years my father truly forbade me to come home. He felt that abandoning university was pure impulsiveness and, for the family, an utter disgrace; so even when my grandmother died during that period, I was not told to come home for her funeral.
Oddballs like me are actually rare. When people like Bill Gates dropped out to start companies, their families, though disapproving, were not necessarily so fiercely opposed. During my years reading at the National Library I made a living mainly by writing, and authored many books; back then the bestsellers were success-studies and "chicken-soup-for-the-soul" books. As a writer with astonishing output, on the principle of "whoever feeds me is my master," I wrote whatever subject paid. To produce manuscripts that would sell, I relied on the National Library's rich resources to expand my knowledge, and had to read quickly and efficiently to save time.
In this strange way I completed my self-education: in China's National Library I read widely, photocopied the best parts, and with scissors and paste reorganized them into one bestseller after another. That experience makes me feel nauseated at the very mention of bestsellers today. Its benefit was that I received a one-of-a-kind education and could be different everywhere. As you know, today, though I am still down and out, I am down and out in a way unlike anyone else's.
During my National Library years, what I read most were medical and Buddhist works. I was obsessed for a long time with psychiatry, for no other reason than that everyone said I was mentally abnormal, and I hoped to learn some psychiatry to cure myself. My first time treating someone was in 2000. I was eating in a small restaurant and noticed the proprietress's puffy, sallow face and anxious look; I asked whether she often had pain in both flanks and often had to sigh to relieve her stuffiness. She nodded like a chicken pecking at rice and asked how I knew. Feeling rather proud, I explained the pathology, wrote a prescription centered on Xiaoyao San, and suggested she take a few doses and see.
As it turned out, the proprietress's years-old stubborn ailment was cured. The next time I ate there, she told the staff to comp me from then on. Deeply moved by this favor, I declined it, and never ate at her place again.
After coming to Beijing, my medical-study career gradually lapsed under the pressure of real life. In a low period, I sold my thick lecture notes on the Shanghan Lun and my Western-medicine textbook of internal medicine to a junk collector for two yuan, which I used to buy a Shandong flatbread to fill my stomach. Alas!
On top of that, I was then full of hot-blooded ardor and recklessness, hoping to accomplish some earth-shattering grand enterprise to transform China, so I put most of my energy into making a living and being an angry young man. As you know, to this day the roster of contemporary China's towering figures still does not include a fellow named Zhou Zhiyuan; so my lofty ambitions and meager talents were mercilessly mocked by reality.
My mother's illness later improved a great deal through the treatment of an old Chinese physician in Jiujiang named Li Zhijian, which set my mind at ease. That old physician is probably about a hundred years old now; I do not know whether he is still living—at ninety-six I knew he was still making house calls. But after that I lost track of him; perhaps he still lives, perhaps he has passed away. He had an excellent reputation in our area; many locals regarded him as a divine physician, because his results were genuinely outstanding and he cured many people's stubborn ailments.
Both my faith in Chinese medicine and my bitterness toward it came from this Dr. Li who treated my mother. His therapeutic results were genuinely good, but he did not use modern medicine's means early enough to detect my mother's gastric cancer, causing her to miss the best window for treatment—that was a fatal shortcoming. But last year my father told me that when Dr. Li treated my mother back then, he had actually asked her to get a gastroscopy; my parents just neglected it.
When I was in my twenties, my mother was being treated by Dr. Li and her condition was stable, when suddenly one day my uncle by marriage called to say my mother had been stricken, lay unconscious in the hospital, and might not be saved; he told me to rush home at once. The call struck me like a thunderbolt. I refused to believe it, thinking my uncle was talking nonsense. But he told me in all earnestness that I must hurry home, lest some great calamity occur and I be unable to fulfill my filial duty at my mother's side. I put down the phone and headed home.
When I arrived, I found my mother in the emergency room of the People's Hospital, eyes and jaw clenched, hair disheveled, unconscious. The doctor told me she had had a cerebral hemorrhage. I felt as if I had been struck on the head; my spirit collapsed, and I wailed outside the ward. In that instant I knew that a person needs to repent of his faults.
My mother was listed as critically ill for twenty-three days. The three of us siblings kept vigil day and night at her bedside. I felt a pain that cut to the marrow, fearing she would never wake; if she did not wake, I would have no chance to apologize and repent to her. My selfishness had hurt her; I wanted to tell her I knew I was wrong; I wanted to tell her that if time could turn back, I would be an obedient son and finish university properly.
During the days my mother was unconscious, several patients died each week in the neurology ward. Every time one died, I would tremble, fearing the next would be my own mother. Although the attending physician had answered my questions about her condition many times, I wearied him with repeated inquiries into how she was faring and what her chance of rescue was.
One dawn, a young mother of about thirty was brought into the ward; her husband carried her, gasping, into the resuscitation room. I watched as the on-duty physician treated her. The patient was covered in purpura, with obvious signs of internal bleeding. The on-duty doctor, a senior schoolmate of mine, asked the family to pay for platelets. The poor husband could not come up with the money; without a word I told my schoolmate to put it on my account and urged him to transfer platelets from the upper-level hospital at once to save her. My schoolmate was rather matter-of-fact: "Zhiyuan, I understand how you feel, but this patient is beyond saving. She must have leukemia or something similar; with internal bleeding this severe and her pupils already dilated, she has only a few hours left."
My schoolmate's words stabbed at my heart. About two hours later the patient began to convulse. Her husband was still on the ward balcony calling his hometown to urge them to wire money fast. I ran to the doctors' office to fetch my schoolmate. He performed emergency CPR while I assisted beside him. But it was useless; her breathing grew more and more rapid, and finally, before my eyes, she stopped breathing. A tear slid from the corner of her eye. She was a young mother with three children; facing her death caused me anguish beyond measure.
I had faced death a few times before, but never so shockingly. This was the parting of life and death. The Buddhist sutras say a human life lies between one breath and the next; impermanence is indeed that swift. The patient's husband told us in grief that, because she had many children and a heavy burden, even though she had leukemia she had kept working and at night made shoe-pads and sold them at a street stall to help support the family. The life of an ordinary little person is so hard.
Because the couple were from Sichuan, after the patient took a turn for the worse they had traveled by bus from Wenzhou in Zhejiang, where they worked, toward their hometown; her condition worsened en route, and they got off at our county people's hospital for emergency care—so she died away from home. Several of us family members in the same ward, truly pitying this young deceased woman and her friendless husband, helped him buy burial clothes, contact the funeral parlor, and take her there to wait for her family to handle the affairs.
When we escorted her out, it was not yet official working hours; the hospital was quiet. After we sighed over her, we fell silent, and I smelled a peculiar scent in the air. I had smelled it every time a patient died—the smell of death. At that time and place, after witnessing this, I did not know how to describe my feelings; now, writing these words, I still do not. No experience other than personal encounter can convey the shock of such a scene.
My mother, amid our trembling fear, finally pulled through: gradually she opened her eyes, recognized us, and could get out of bed. As soon as she was a little better, she fretted over my business and urged me back to Beijing to manage it. On the fifth day of the first lunar month of the second year after her rescue, she suddenly vomited a large amount of black vomit. I was home for the Spring Festival; seeing the vomit I felt deep foreboding, yet desperately hoped it would be a false alarm. I called my schoolmate; while soothing me he had me rule out whether my mother had gastric cancer.
The later tests confirmed my schoolmate's suspicion. To confirm the diagnosis, I took my mother to Tongji Hospital in Wuhan and registered with an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He glanced at the lab report and told me there was no need to doubt it: mid-to-late-stage gastric cancer. I brought my mother to Beijing for surgery, partly because Beijing's medical conditions were better and partly because it was easier for me to care for her there.
I completely sealed the news of my mother's gastric cancer. Apart from my wife, father, and brother, no one knew—not even her own sisters or my uncles. I did not want my mother to live in fear and panic from the day of diagnosis. My father's brothers were estranged and family relations extremely complex; to spare my mother repeated hurt back home, I kept her by my side to care for her.
My mother was simple and kind, with powerful sympathy, pitying the poor and the orphaned; all her life she suffered for helping others yet never lost her warm heart. She was guileless, as artless as a child. I do not know whether my mother ever did a bad thing in her life; to judge objectively, in my memory she spent her whole life helping others. My uncle had too many children, so she adopted his daughter and raised her. When my third aunt died young, my mother cared for the child she left behind. When I was naughty as a boy and sneaked a melon or fruit from someone's garden to eat, my mother always scolded and struck me. She lived an honest, pious, long-suffering, hard life, bearing her burdens as she walked.
When she was found to have cancer, my spirit nearly collapsed, yet I still treated her full of hope. After surgery I sought out all kinds of "divine physician" information. Though I had studied medicine a long time myself, I had no confidence in myself; I hoped to find experts and famous doctors to save my mother's life, and spared no expense. I sought out nearly all of China's top experts on gastric cancer. Just like the many cancer-patient family members I meet today who are new to the disease, I rushed about everywhere.
Unfortunately, the famous doctors could not cure my mother. In her last two years, she suffered from cancer and the sequelae of stroke. Once, when I brought wine and gifts to seek treatment, an old physician told me my mother had less than two months left, and the probability she would live past two months was about one in a million.
Walking out of his house, my legs felt like mush; the sky looked vast and gray, and I felt as if I had fallen into a storm-tossed sea, helpless and hopeless. By then, the doctors who had treated my mother began avoiding us, because no doctor wanted to take up the last baton. I understood them; no doctor wants to face death directly.
My mother's final days I treated myself. I kept her going for over a year, so that three days before she died she could still go out and play cards, and she left the world with little pain. In the years after her illness, mother and son supported each other through troubled waters; at the moment of final parting I held her and wept, and though she could no longer speak, she still sobbed. The bitterest thing in life is a mother and son's eternal farewell.
In her last years, my mother several times hoped for euthanasia, because she was tormented by stroke sequelae. For a time I lived near Shahe Reservoir in Changping and often walked with my mother by the reservoir. Several times, in tears, she asked me to help her die; I begged her to bear the pain, to overcome our difficulties together, and to stay with us. At the time I was studying medicine hard, trying every way to ease my mother's suffering, because every trip to the hospital ended with doctors telling me helplessly that her stroke sequelae and cancer were worldwide unsolved problems with no solution. It was like solving a math problem with no answer.
Yet as family, how could we give up because of a few words from professional doctors? I bought almost all the medical classics, waking around three every morning and sleeping around midnight, studying medicine forgetful of food and rest to ease my mother's suffering. At one point my own body collapsed for over a year. Every method I found worked for a while, then stopped working. The helplessness and grief I encountered are beyond words.
In 2011, an aunt of mine passed away from esophageal cancer; on May 3, 2012, my mother passed away; in 2013, another aunt passed away from a sudden cerebral hemorrhage, and the same year my aunt by marriage passed away from a ruptured lung. In 2014, my father-in-law passed away from a third cerebral infarction. They were all around sixty years old.
Death had become one of the greatest themes of my life at this age. In 2008, by chance, a cancer patient came to me for treatment. After that, people kept coming to me; though I was not a licensed physician, I gradually gained a reputation in cancer circles through my medical skill. Most were patients like my mother—people the hospital doctors had run off until they had nowhere to go, or destitute patients with no money for hospitalization. As a cancer patient's son, I could perhaps feel their sufferings more deeply and empathize with everything they faced, which made communicating with them easier. Thus, every month I sent off several critically ill patients, repeating words of consolation like "bear your grief and accept the inevitable" to their families.
My wish to study medicine was finally realized under the pressure of reality—yet this reality was so cruel. Life's tragedies taught me how illusory my former pursuit of fame and gain had been. Having spent long among cancer patients, I can no longer easily adapt to the interpersonal relationships people build on falseness and vanity.
Cancer patients and their families are people who face death at close range. For them, life is the most precious thing, and genuine feeling between people the most worth cherishing. This group is movingly sincere; before the god of death they have laid aside all disguises. When one's life hangs by a thread, what use are fame and gain?
This is also the most sympathetic group. I have initiated and taken part in many social relief efforts; most participants are people from this group and some deeply compassionate volunteers. We understand one another, huddle together, and warm each other. Over time we become one another's spiritual support. If someone loses contact for a long stretch, a vague foreboding arises in our hearts; dropping out of such a line may mean death.
Now, for me, life is already a cup of plain boiled water. In early August this year I returned to my hometown and stood calmly before my mother's grave. Three years on, weeds had grown rank around her grave, the artemisia taller than I. This handful of yellow earth will eventually be my own resting place. I know that wherever I go, my ashes may one day be scattered on this land, to accompany my mother and my hometown's green hills and waters.
Nowadays the wildness and dreams of youth have turned to thin smoke, drifting away on the wind. What I finally cannot forget is only, hidden in my blood across these thirty-some years of life, that different kind of feeling—the feeling that has tied my whole life to the learning of healing body and mind. I do not know where I am going tomorrow, but wherever my steps take me, what I feel most deeply is the sorrowful voice of living beings tormented by disease.
The same story unfolds every day without end. This is our real world.