The Longest-Lasting Acute Illness I Have Had in Recent Years

Having fallen ill on April 3, I have still not fully recovered as of today. Originally, on April 4, I thought I was better; on April 5 I even rode my bicycle to the vegetable plot to do some farming, but when I came back in the evening I felt something was wrong again. The next day my tonsils became inflamed, and by the 6th it was severe enough to have pus in my throat, with my whole body weak and aching. But work still had to be done, so I could only push on while sick.

On April 7 I had to combine Chinese and Western medicine. I bought cefuroxime axetil tablets, Pudilan oral liquid, Koujie spray and Xiguashan lozenges online on Meituan, using all four together. Then I drank more water, slept more, and put off what work I could. After two days of treatment, the swollen and suppurating tonsils finally basically returned to normal, and eating and drinking no longer felt like swallowing razor blades. My temperature and strength returned to normal.

Surprisingly, a patch of lichen-like skin hyperplasia on my back that had been there for several years also disappeared. Reading the package insert for cefuroxime axetil tablets carefully, I found that it indeed treats uncomplicated skin and soft-tissue infections caused by susceptible Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus pyogenes. Streptococcus is a common pathogen that has spread among humans for more than two thousand years. It is transmitted mainly through droplets and can colonize our upper respiratory tract both short- and long-term; tonsillitis and cutaneous impetigo are the lesions it most easily induces. It can also trigger severe scarlet fever and cause the patient's death.

A virus can easily tear a big hole in a person's immune system when he is physically and mentally exhausted; bacteria that were previously latent or newly infected can then take advantage of the opening. Multiple infections can instantly turn a strong man into a frail patient. If we know too little medicine and pay little attention to our health, we can easily die from an infection that seems trivial.

A high school classmate of mine died three years ago for exactly this reason. This past Spring Festival I learned from his wife the whole process of his passing, and was very sad for a while. He was a grassroots policeman, upright and kind-hearted; actually, in my memory his personality was rather timid, and in high school he was far less willing than I was to speak out against injustice. After he became a policeman in the town, he overworked himself and his body could not take it. He himself did not really like being a policeman, so he studied law on his own, took the judicial exam, and switched to being a lawyer.

A newly qualified lawyer also has to do a lot of hard work and often put in overtime. In the summer of 2020 he was infected with a virus that was never identified even up to his death, which then triggered a very high fever. He roughly went through a process of "the virus opening the way, bacteria flanking him," and finally died despite treatment. When I heard the news of his death, at the end of 2020, my heart felt as if it had been stabbed by a knife.

He was one of my best old classmates, but unfortunately he did not know that I could treat persistent high fever caused by infectious diseases. At the end, two other doctor classmates of ours who were not specialists in infectious diseases took part in his rescue, and at the time I did not receive any word at all, so I could not intervene in time. If I had taken part in that rescue, combining Chinese and Western medicine, he in all probability would not have died. This matter still weighs on me to this day.

During the three pandemic years I was sealed inside Beijing by the advisory ban of "no need to leave Beijing." This Spring Festival I went home for the New Year and really wanted to go to his home to give his family some money to support his children, but his family refused. Both before and after his death, I failed to do what I wished for this old friend; looking back on our friendship, I can only feel deep regret.

Not understanding medicine and not paying attention can easily cause a middle-aged person, worn out by toil in body and mind, to perish from an unexpected infection. Now, what he went through, I nearly went through too. My greatest advantage is that I have learned a great deal of medical knowledge, know how to handle my own condition, and can stop matters from deteriorating in time.

Even so, I still suffered a great deal in this latest infection. After I fell ill, my wife panicked. With me around to care for the family, she had almost never worried about anyone falling ill, and I myself had rarely in the past twenty-plus years had an infection this severe. Because I had previously taken on all the work of caring for sick family members, she barely knew how to nurse a patient, so I could only weakly instruct her how to look after me. When it was especially severe and I was feverish and groggy, I had no strength even to speak to her, and she could only stand by and weep. The pillar had fallen, and she was at a loss.

Fortunately, my fever did not last long. Relying on a heat-therapy pillow to continuously induce sweating, I broke the fever in just one day and one night. After the fever broke, although my strength was not what it used to be, I was not particularly weak; I could still handle some work, and even meet some patients I had to meet—after all, their conditions could not be delayed either.

This illness also let me feel how hard it is to reach middle age. Since the major family incident on February 23, I had spent more than a month eating and sleeping badly, trying every which way to deal with the police, procuratorate and courts; my immunity had dropped to rock bottom. Daily work could not be delayed, family matters were exhausting, my child was about to take the college entrance exam, and—affected by the family troubles—the child also fell seriously ill, and my niece was even admitted to the ICU for a few days. I was really sniped by one thing after another, worn out in body and mind. Even when ill I could not rest properly; the things that had to be handled could not be put off, because delay would be a matter of life and death.

During this time, a newly added ovarian-cancer patient would constantly put on airs of "the patient is God," criticizing and abusing me; I could only patiently endure. But she escalated, and in the end I had to refund her consultation fee, apologize to her, ask her to find someone better, and blacklist her. Although, judging roughly from her irritable personality, I suspected she was also a manic-depressive patient, I could not, like a saint, when my own and my family's lives were in peril, spend my last ounce of strength to satisfy her emotional demands. By the self-sacrificing spirit of religious believers, we should cut our own flesh to feed the hawk; fortunately I am not a religious person and do not have such lofty sentiments, so there is no need to kidnap myself into pandering to a patient recklessly.

This illness also taught me that my body is not made of iron. For the sake of relatives and for patients, I must not work myself to death. Saving some care for myself and drawing a boundary for relatives and patients, I can live a few years longer.