Illness Arrives Suddenly Like a Swift Wind

At noon last Friday, my father called to tell me he had had diarrhea for several days and treatment at the township health center was not working. I found a previously effective prescription of his and told him to use Bifid Triple Viable capsules plus montmorillonite powder. Once he started it on Saturday, his condition improved markedly; by Sunday he told me he was fully recovered.

On Friday I took leave and went home from school. I had had a cold for over a week and had been reluctant to take medicine; the symptoms were mild, and last week I thought I could try to beat the cold with my own immunity. So from Monday to Thursday I ran every morning until I sweated slightly. But perhaps because of my age, my immunity was not up to it, and my cold grew worse.

Fortunately, after returning home on Friday I promptly took my own Chai-Gui Jiedu pills and drank some Gouteng-Bohe tea. In just over a day, all the cold symptoms eased greatly, and by Saturday I was basically well.

Saturday evening I was laughing and talking with my wife and child; the child had group-bought meal vouchers for a Mid-Autumn family dinner, planning for the three of us to have a reunion meal. After breakfast on Sunday, I was video-chatting with a friend in Wuhan. My son went to the bathroom and suddenly came out in agonizing pain, sweating profusely. Because I was on the video call, he quickly contacted his mother to tell her. His mother called me, but I did not catch it clearly at the time.

But a moment later the commotion from the child alerted me. I hung up at once and went to see him in the bathroom, asking what had happened. He told me that a few days earlier, at a classmate gathering, he had drunk a glass of prune juice and had had diarrhea ever since. At first he thought it was just habitual diarrhea—three generations of our family have this problem—and treated it as a minor matter, not paying much attention. Two days earlier his anus had ached faintly, but not severely, so he ignored it. Today the pain suddenly became excruciating, and he could not bear it.

At first I judged it might be rectal prolapse or an anal fissure, and prepared to take him to a nearby Grade-A tertiary hospital for imaging to confirm. After a digital rectal exam, the proctologist on duty judged it should be a perianal abscess. This was the first person in our family to be diagnosed with this condition, and I found it hard to believe.

Judging from the child's clinical symptoms, they did not quite fit the typical features of a perianal abscess. His pain was not continuous but appeared only after defecation, relieved by post-defecation washing and rest; and the pain was a burning pain rather than a throbbing or pulling pain. I used Deepseek to analyze it and thought it leaned more toward inflammation than abscess—or, even if an abscess, a very early one.

On Sunday I gave him a combined TCM formula of Huanglian Jiedu Tang, Baijiangcao Yiyiren San, Dahuang Mudanpi Tang, and Shaoyao Gancao Tang, plus the Western drug cephalosporin. The child's pain quickly eased, and we could laugh and talk again; at the time I mistakenly thought he should improve with internal medicine alone.

But I did not dare let down my guard. Sunday night I could barely sleep soundly; I went through all the medical books at home, hoping to use them as reference to judge the child's condition.

I read up on perianal abscess and learned that if it really is one, the treatment of choice is radical surgery, with comprehensive postoperative care to prevent recurrence. Honestly, I dared not risk my own son; I had to carefully weigh all possible risks. So that night I had his mother book an online appointment with the gastroenterology department of the People's Hospital, planning to take him on Monday.

Monday morning, after the child got up and had another bowel movement, the post-defecation pain was much lighter. Seeing the treatment working, I was happy. But to be cautious I still decided to take him to the hospital for further examination as planned. The doctor on duty also judged, after a digital exam, that it was a perianal abscess, and wrote us an order for a colonoscopy to confirm. But Beijing's Grade-A tertiary hospitals are so crowded that the test had to be scheduled and could not be done that day.

The attending physician told me that the hospital has had an unusual number of perianal abscess patients lately; the disease is common among students and teachers at nearby universities and research institutes, largely because of their long-term sedentary lifestyle. If these teachers and students also have chronic enteritis, their risk of sudden perianal abscess is even higher.

The attending surgeon performs several radical perianal-abscess operations a day, but even so his schedule was already booked through October 9; the earliest we could reserve was the afternoon of October 9. Hearing that the child's symptoms had eased that day, he advised us to try internal medicine first and observe; if it did not work, come back for a drainage procedure first to draw off the pus and relieve symptoms, and later schedule the radical surgery. I thought this was good advice and followed it.

But on our two round trips to the hospital, the taxi drivers drove very roughly, and after the bumps the child's pain worsened sharply. The former burning pain had turned into a throbbing pain; now there was no doubt—it was a perianal abscess, and the infected area was probably forming pus.

At home at noon, the child went to the bathroom and again broke out in a sweat from pain; even painkillers did not help. We decided not to delay any longer and took him back to the hospital for drainage first to release the pus, and later schedule the radical surgery.

Outside the wound-creation room where this drainage is done, a long queue had formed, all waiting for the same operation. Just as the attending surgeon had said, these people looked, at a glance, exactly like the students and researchers from the universities along Beijing's Xueyuan Road. This area is densely packed with many 985, 211, and Double First-Class universities, whose teachers and students are masters of sitting on cold benches. Little do they know that sitting on a cold bench too long easily leads to the five classic signs of suppurative inflammation in the anus—redness, swelling, heat, pain, and impaired function.

Drainage is simple; one takes only a few minutes. If one were braver, at home one could disinfect a sewing needle and puncture the abscess to drain it. Perianal abscess sounds unfamiliar, but it is really just a suppurative infection focus around the anus, like a boil on the body surface.

Almost every patient emerging from the operating room after drainage walked out with one hand covering the anus and the other on the wall, wearing an expression that was half-laugh, half-cry. They came out of all ages, both sexes, tall and short, fat and thin, yet their gestures and expressions were eerily similar. The families waiting outside found it funny yet deeply distressing, comforting their loved ones while unable to suppress their laughter.

After my son came out, he told me that once the drainage removed the pus, the unbearable pain vanished at once. The pain of the incision was nothing to him; his tolerance for pain has always been high, and a little local anesthetic was used. Even so, he could only rest both hands on my shoulders, leaning most of his weight on me to lighten his burden, edging forward in tiny steps.

With the pain gone, the child was in good spirits and began telling me jokes as we left. Although the operating room was divided by partitions, he could still hear the conversations between other patients and the doctors. He said a patient in the next cubicle was howling in pain, and the doctor comforted him: "That's nothing; the fellow next door will have it far worse than you in a moment." My son realized: next door was me. It nearly made him burst out laughing.

Then after a moment he asked his own doctor, "When do they start cutting my wound?" The doctor replied, "Yours is already done! Didn't you feel it?" And so the drainage of the two patients ended amid the doctor's cheerful banter, the whole procedure taking no more than five minutes. I understand these joking surgeons; they use this to distract patients and keep them from being too tense. If I were operating, I would probably do the same.

On the way home from the hospital I said to him: Son, let's stop grinding ourselves in academia; a few hundred years ago, humans had no such titles as master's or doctorate, and we can live perfectly well without them, right? Why sit on a cold bench until you develop such excruciating perianal abscess? But my son still finds it hard to let go of his wish to pursue a master's and doctorate, so I can only urge him to combine mental and physical work and move around as much as possible.

Actually I cannot even dissuade myself; when it comes to sitting on a cold bench, I rarely meet my match. I have haunted the National Library since I was 19, and it has been most of my life; most of my spare time I spend reading and writing in libraries. Moreover, our family has a hereditary history of enteritis, diarrhea is routine, and I get diarrhea if I eat anything slightly unclean, so I never eat out casually. These two are exactly the high-risk factors for perianal abscess; that I have not had it before was pure luck.

My child's illness made me realize that our own lifestyle is also unhealthy and urgently needs correcting. Perhaps because I also like farming, balancing mental and physical work, I escaped this disease. Around Beijing's Xueyuan Road, where so many intellectuals gather, there are legions of sedentary researchers, and many of them get this disease. Most of all, it hits male university students around twenty, who must sit long hours preparing for graduate-school and civil-service exams, and who have vigorous sex-hormone secretion; their incidence of perianal abscess is more than ten times that of ordinary people. You could say they have literally worn their backsides into trouble through over-competition.

After drainage, the child can get around normally; it is a minimally invasive procedure. I too could return to school for now. On Monday afternoon, after my wife and I brought him home, we agreed that I would go back to school while his mother cared for him. My heart was full of concern for my wife and child, but I helplessly bought a high-speed rail ticket back to class. I had already taken two and a half days off, and I will need more leave later when the child has his surgery. Now, while he is comparatively stable, I must return to school to catch up on the missed courses and finish my studies smoothly.

When I decided to return to school to study Western medicine, my biggest worry was that a family member might fall ill midway and need me to step away, preventing me from finishing. At that time I worried most about a difficult situation with my father; it never occurred to me that my child would suddenly develop such a problem. But since it has come, I must deal with it; I can only meet each problem as it arises, solve it, and continue my studies with the burden in tow. I cannot abandon this endeavor over a small setback.

A person plays many social roles. To my father I am a son; to my son I am a father; to my wife I am a husband; in patients' eyes I am the person helping them recover; to relatives and friends I am a capable helper now and then; at school I am a student; and to some colleagues who study medicine with me, I am a teacher.

It is not easy to play so many social roles well, but however hard it is, we must keep moving forward. Life goes on, and this teamwork must continue. Every time a family member falls ill like this, I sincerely feel that I must study medicine well; only by studying medicine well can I safeguard the health of myself, my relatives, and others.

What comforts me is that, all along the way, my wife has been able to resolve many of my worries, letting me keep moving. Without her understanding and support, this road of pursuing my dream would have been very hard to complete.

At 8:30 on Monday evening I arrived at school. Evening self-study had not ended, so I went to the classroom and finished a lab report, then slept well in the dorm. Tuesday morning I got up and ran 1500 meters along the track, completing the university's required "sunshine run." After breakfast I returned to the classroom and began the next cycle.

Life is always full of disappointments. The most important thing is not that no accident ever occurs, but that after one occurs, we have the ability to put our lives back in order.