On December 26, 2022, we decided to get in touch with all our relatives and friends back home, to find out how they were doing and see whether anyone needed my help.
My late father-in-law had a closest friend—a brother who, back at the start of Reform and Opening, went south to Guangdong to work alongside him. This friend had adopted my wife as his goddaughter. Our two families have always kept in touch; my son calls him grandpa and I call him Dad. My godfather told us he had just finished dressing the body, in the village, of a young niece-in-law of the clan born in 1982.This young woman had three underage children. She had recently caught COVID, her fever had resolved, and her clinical symptoms had basically disappeared. Two days ago, going to pick up her child, she suddenly collapsed mid-step and could not get up; when found, she had already died of sudden cardiac death. After my godfather dressed the body, relatives returned from out of town and opened the coffin for a last look; they found the poor woman mouth and nose full of blood. My godfather wept bitterly on the spot.My junior fellow apprentice works at the county TCM hospital; he is an orthopedist, but now every department in the hospital has become a COVID ward. Many relatives and friends called begging him to use connections to get them admitted, but he could do nothing: beds are impossible to find in every county hospital. Yesterday their TCM hospital had six deaths, one of them born in 1987, also sudden cardiac death.My first teacher, who is also my wife second uncle, has late-stage lung cancer and has recently been hospitalized; my second aunt is nursing him at his bedside. Her own COVID is nearly over—no more fever, no particularly obvious symptoms. The ward is overcrowded, so my teacher (and second uncle) could only get an extra bed in the corridor. The corridor leaks drafts, and Hubei has no heating, so it is bitterly cold. My second aunt wanted to carry him into the ward to spread a mat on the floor, since it is sheltered and warmer there; on the way she tripped and fell and lost consciousness. Imaging showed both cerebral infarction and myocardial infarction—the most common complication of COVID patients recognized internationally.The attending doctor told the family to take her back to the village as soon as possible, warning that if they delayed, she would not make it home and would die on the way. On the evening of December 25 she was sent back to the village; the family made all the funeral preparations and dressed her in burial clothes. But the old woman was stubbornly alive and, by the 26th, had not yet breathed her last. Her child is my childhood friend; on learning she still lived, I called at once to coach him through folk first aid. To this day she remains between life and death.When I called my fourth uncle, he said he had lost his appetite for days; he added that many in the village had no appetite, a tasteless mouth, and felt the cold. On December 26 my fourth uncle had just finished dressing the body of one of my great-aunts—another elder had died in our village, this great-aunt of mine.When I called my eldest cousin at my uncle house, he said his head felt as if squeezed in a tight band, painful and wretched, with no appetite for days; after over ten days these symptoms still would not ease. His niece, standing beside him, said she felt the same. Over the phone I coached them on how to relieve these symptoms.My junior fellow apprentice told me a death peak is coming back home; the several county hospitals are already full of critical patients. My own teacher (shifu) was also unwell, so I wrote a decoction for him to fill. As vice president of our county TCM hospital, he has reasonably broad local connections, yet in a Chaihu Guizhi Tang I wrote, he could not source three herbs—Huangqin, Guizhi and Zhi Gancao—nowhere in the whole county.My relatives have all kinds of underlying diseases, and COVID has triggered bizarre symptoms. Whenever they ask me for a formula, I oblige. But when they go to pharmacies, many herbs are unobtainable. I long to return home to care for my townsfolk, but my junior fellow apprentice says, "Even if you come back, you would be a hero with no place to show his prowess—we have no medicine."These days more and more people are dying; at this rate, a mortality of even one in a thousand may not hold. The excess deaths caused by the medical crunch are enormous. And the virus truly is like a cluster bomb—it triggers so many problems; I have now seen all kinds of unheard-of symptoms caused by COVID.Some patients tell me their vision doubles; others frankly say they have seen ghosts; some have blood pressure spiking, others have it suddenly dropping; some have chest oppression; some are plainly fine in the first week and then, in the second, suddenly develop fatigue and chest tightness. Many patients, after the fever breaks and strength returns, suddenly develop white lung or die of a cardiovascular event.Everyone should hold this disease in awe; do not think that because you have recovered you are out of danger. Research data released by the United States this February showed that, compared with uninfected people, COVID-19 patients within one year of recovery had about a 63% higher risk of a series of potentially fatal cardiovascular events—abnormal heart rhythm, inflammation, thrombosis, stroke, heart attack, heart failure.So within a year of recovery we remain at risk of sudden death. Chinese doctors now lack experience with this disease and cannot yet guide patients on how to cope; of course, doctors worldwide are also inexperienced. If we focus simply on avoiding sudden cardiovascular death, we should eat lightly, exercise moderately, keep warm against the cold, and avoid overwork.Strictly speaking, many patients are not actually recovered; many symptoms have not cleared. The sooner these symptoms are relieved, the much lower their death risk. For example, if the headache is relieved early, the risk of stroke falls greatly, and secondary depression becomes much rarer.But who will treat them? Where are the medicines? Doctors and drugs are both severely scarce, and this situation will not ease for many months—perhaps a year. The follow-up treatment ahead is a series of hard battles, not easy at all.Traditional decoction-making wastes herbs, so I am figuring out how to prepare more economical pills, powders, plasters and pellets for my family to solve their problems. If they work well for my family, I will later share these treatment experiences publicly. After all, this is only clinical-trial-type treatment; apart from my own flesh and blood, I dare not rashly apply it to others.By data I have seen, about 10–20% of patients may have symptoms lasting 1–3 months, and about 1% may have symptoms lasting over a year. As for the cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease triggered by COVID, that is even more complex and may be lifelong.These patients actually need follow-up treatment. Doctors worldwide are exploring how to treat after COVID recovery; given my influence among patients and the number of long-term patients I serve, I cannot avoid this problem. If it cannot be avoided, I must press ahead.