Fate Led Me Down the Path I Walk Today

In September, I dreamed of my mother twice, both times while sleeping in the school dormitory. Both dreams were the same: the scene of the final farewell between mother and son at her deathbed. When I woke up, my heart was still filled with grief. In the dead of night, lying alone on the dormitory bed, my emotions surged. I hadn't had such a dream for nearly ten years; after all, my mother has been gone for thirteen years.

Perhaps because life has changed so dramatically, stirring up the deep pain in my heart, I dreamed of my mother twice in a row. If my mother hadn't been ill, I don't think I would have formed such an indissoluble bond with medicine in this life, nor would I, at this age, still be persevering enough to go to school for a clinical medical education.

My mother lived her whole life mostly in the most grassroots rural areas of China. From childhood I witnessed her tormented by illness, deeply hoping a doctor could relieve her suffering, but that never came to pass. My mother finally passed away from illness at the age of 58, and this is a pain I can never shake off for the rest of my life. The medical school I am now attending mainly trains grassroots medical talent from all over the country. Since coming to school, I earnestly hope that the classmates around me will study hard and, after graduation, go to grassroots society to help relieve the suffering of ordinary people like my mother.

But what I hear with my ears and see with my eyes are all children who aren't working hard enough. They are basically addicted to mobile games, and few are willing to settle down and study seriously. In the early days, my heart couldn't help but be touched by this situation, and I felt deeply desolate.

But gradually, I came to understand that this is a fact we have to admit: there are few development opportunities at the grassroots level, and high-quality medical talent is unwilling to go there; only these less-hardworking medical graduates are willing to go to grassroots positions. If a person wants better medical conditions, they have to strive for them on their own. If these classmates of mine can master some basic treatment methods for common diseases, that will be enough for the daily work of grassroots medical institutions. From this perspective, the effort they are putting in now is indeed already sufficient.

Even so, I still try my best to use my personal influence to affect a very few classmates, encouraging them to become diligent and upward-striving people who can later become slightly better-skilled doctors and bring blessings to their patients. But this can't be rushed; I can only lead by example and subtly influence these classmates, who are even younger than my own children and still callow.

While studying Western medicine at school, I occasionally wonder: if my first-choice university in the 1998 college entrance exam hadn't been missed, and I had been admitted to clinical medicine back then, would my understanding of TCM not be as deep as it is now? When attending clinical medicine classes, I often silently sigh to myself: if I had not studied TCM for so many years before studying clinical medicine, but had studied clinical medicine first, I might be full of prejudice against TCM. And if I had not studied clinical medicine after gaining rich TCM clinical experience, I might be full of prejudice against Western medicine. Either scenario would have been quite regrettable.

The me of today is someone who has prejudice neither against TCM nor against Western medicine. I do not scorn the achievements of modern science, nor do I scorn the primitive practical experience of treating diseases that humankind has groped out of life since ancient times. For a given patient's specific situation, I can choose the more appropriate medical plan that causes less harm to the patient.

All of this is the hand of fate working in the unseen. It let me experience everything I went through in the first half of my life, let me feel the pain of losing my mother, let me witness both the efficacy and the shortcomings of TCM, and also witness the efficacy and shortcomings of Western medicine. It also gave me the opportunity to study both TCM and Western medicine, and the opportunity to serve patients, so that I could come to a comprehensive understanding of medicine through practice. If I don't attribute all this to fate's arrangement, I don't know what more suitable explanation there could be.

From September until now, some more close relatives and friends have been diagnosed with tumor-type diseases. Their examination reports were sent to me immediately, and I have been deeply involved in formulating their treatment plans. I used to think that in a few years I would go back to grassroots society to treat common headaches and minor ailments for ordinary people like my mother.

But I also understand that this is already an impossible wish for me. My path has led here, and I can never go back. Society needs me to take on greater responsibility, needs me to fight more serious diseases. After enjoying a few years of quiet campus life, I still have to return to my battlefield. Because fighting terminal illness requires a person to put in enormous effort, and there are not many people in this world willing to put in enormous effort; I happen to be one of them. So fate has long since prepared my place for me, and I cannot escape fate's arrangement.

In the book We Are Our Brains, the Dutch neuroscientist Dick Swaab says that all the things a person encounters in life, though they seem accidental, actually have their necessary reasons behind them; nothing is truly accidental. What we encounter, and whom we become close to, was already determined at the moment we became a fertilized egg.

Because what we do throughout our lives depends on our brain, and what our brain will develop into was also determined at the moment we became a fertilized egg. This can be called a kind of scientific fatalism. Having reached middle age, I have come to believe in this fatalism and consciously accept fate's arrangement. In the unseen, the Creator led me onto the path I walk today; there must be a reason for it.