Qingming Reflections

Originally I had planned to go home this Qingming Festival to sweep my mother's grave, but some things delayed me, and then I came down with another bad cold just before Qingming, so I could not go back.

A few days before Qingming, an old patient came to Beijing on business and asked to see me. We had known each other for more than ten years, and it would have been impolite to refuse, so the two of us met at a KFC near my home. He is a lung-cancer patient and has now survived ten years. He was thirty-six the year he was diagnosed, and is now forty-seven. At the beginning he himself could not believe he would live this long, neither could I, and neither could the other doctors who treated him.

When he first came to see me, it was just over a month after my mother had died. Her "full seven days" memorial had only just passed, and I had just returned to Beijing to see the child when he arrived. At that time I was utterly crushed; I had lost all interest in life and all confidence in myself. He, meanwhile, was a lung-cancer patient newly diagnosed. He pleaded with me to help him. At first I refused, telling him I was a useless person who could not even save his own mother, and dared not delay anyone else again.

But he said to me earnestly, "I believe you will definitely be able to help me. Don't doubt your own ability. We fellow patients all trust you. We are also very sad that your mother has passed away, but cancer is a special disease, and your mother had a history of cerebral hemorrhage, which made treatment even more complicated; maintaining her for so many years was already very hard. No one doubts your ability because your mother died. You must pull yourself together; we need you. As long as you pull yourself together, you can create great social value."

The pain of losing a mother cannot be soothed away by a few words from him, but I am ashamed to say that it was precisely a group of cancer patients and their families like him who, step by step, drew me out of the deep depression I fell into after my mother died. Those years were indeed very hard for me: from 2012 to 2015, a full three years, I did not use a mobile phone.

In early 2012 of the Gregorian calendar, once my mother's condition became critical, I went to the pharmacy to fill her prescription. I was walking in such frantic haste that I lost the Motorola phone I had been using. After that, for more than three years I neither bought nor used a phone. In 2015, my wife felt that if I continued to shut myself away and sink like this I would become a useless person, so she insisted on spending a month's salary to buy me an iPhone, and only then did I have a phone again.

But patients always managed to find me. Even when for a time I hid in an uninhabited mountain temple in my hometown, they still found me. During those three years I was indeed in a depressive state, but I never took antidepressants; my antidepressant was the fellow patients I had come to know over the years. Even now I still feel deeply grateful to these patients and their families. We used to stay in touch through QQ groups, comforting one another, exchanging information and helping one another. Later, when WeChat came along, we stopped using QQ groups, but the deep friendships of those days remain.

Patients with advanced, especially end-stage, cancer are the most pitiable, because usually when they seek treatment they run into a wall everywhere; doctors, to avoid risk, refuse to take them on. After my mother's cancer recurred and metastasized, I took her seeking treatment everywhere and often ran into walls. Once I went to a very famous doctor, bringing several thousand yuan worth of liquor and tobacco as a gift, just to beg him to make an exception and reach out to save my mother. But he told me the chance of my mother surviving more than three months was infinitesimally small—about the same as my winning a big lottery prize—so he advised me to give up. In fact, under my care, my mother lived for more than two years after that, and in the end she died of a second cerebral hemorrhage rather than recurrence of gastric cancer.

So many advanced patients exist in a state of "self-medicating," getting treatment plans from exchanges with fellow patients to get through their final days. In the last years of my mother's life, I basically had no heart for work; all my mind was on studying medicine. Besides caring for my mother, I also looked after other fellow patients in the patient groups, often achieving unexpected results and solving problems that seemed impossible. Because I knew a lot of medical knowledge and the advice I gave worked, I began to acquire a modest reputation in that community.

One day, the son of a cancer patient who was very close to me came to Beijing to find me. He said to me, "Brother Zhou, there are two things I beg you to stick with. First, keep writing articles related to cancer; at the very least, I myself have eased the pain my mother's cancer caused me by reading your articles, and many of the plans you have shared have genuinely helped my mother. Second, for the sake of other cancer patients like our mothers, give up your current career, study medicine, take the licensing exam, become a doctor, and help us. We believe you will definitely be one of the best doctors we need."

It was also he who told me that the health authorities have an apprenticeship model in traditional medicine, through which people who take up medicine later in life can obtain a physician's qualification and practice legally. He used to be a journalist and a lawyer; I heard that a few years ago he himself took this path, giving up his old profession to study under a master. The reason was simple: after his mother died, he too felt that in this world only medicine, which can save lives, was worth striving for; everything else was worthless.

My mother has been gone eleven years, and I still meet some of the patients I knew and treated when she was alive; this makes me feel very gratified. Although my mother did not survive, seeing other cancer patients survive, we former family members of cancer patients are genuinely happy for them.

This lung-cancer patient who recently came to see me has, since 2013, once a year sent me local specialties from his hometown. At first I firmly refused to accept them, but as time passed and we grew closer, I made an exception and accepted them. Later, when his condition stabilized and he no longer needed frequent medication and treatment, he still sent local specialties once a year. Each time I receive what he sends, I know he is still alive, and my heart is glad for him. He is a very grateful and reasonable person; he knows I am busier day by day and never disturbs me casually, so often a whole year passes without a word between us. In recent years I have only known he is still alive when his package arrives.

This year he came to Beijing on business and insisted on seeing me in person to thank me. I asked after his health; he said everything is normal. He has read every article I have written over the years, printed them out and bound them into volumes. He has been following every anti-cancer method I introduced, and has bought and read some of the books I recommended. He said that during last year's COVID wave, his whole family got through it relying on the treatment methods introduced in my articles—a narrow escape once again—and he felt deeply moved.

This time when he came to see me, I was a completely different person from the one he had met in 2012. I had thoroughly walked out of the grief of losing my mother and was no longer so attached to birth, aging, illness and death. A few months after he saw me in 2012, I completed the formalities for the apprenticeship in traditional medicine, said goodbye to my former career and life, and opened up a brand-new life. But now I am no longer satisfied with learning only this much; I want to learn more medicine, to master both Chinese and Western medicine well, and to learn internal and external Chinese medicine as well as acupuncture and tuina. If possible, I would even like to study for a degree in biology; the rest of my life will be fixed in the field of life sciences.

After my mother fell ill, I burned the midnight oil, year after year, immersed in medical research, all to save her life, but in the end I failed at the last moment. I often regret having started medicine too late; if my medical knowledge when my mother was alive had been as rich as it is today, she would not have passed away so early. The ancients said that not knowing medicine is unfilial; only after experiencing the death of a close relative can we realize how important medicine is. Many famous physicians in history took up medicine in earnest only after a loved one died—Li Dongyuan, one of the Four Great Masters of the Jin-Yuan period, was like this, and so was Zhu Danxi.

Shortly before Qingming, another young patient came to see me; she had breast cancer. When she came to Beijing for treatment, an acquaintance of hers strongly urged her to be sure to come and see me once. She took his advice, contacted me, and met me. During an interview of more than an hour, she several times held back tears in her eyes. Since falling ill her spirit had nearly collapsed; the process of seeking treatment had not been smooth, and she felt confused about future treatment.

Her tumor was strongly ER-positive, weakly PR-positive, and HER2-positive—what people commonly call triple-positive breast cancer. She had registered at two Grade-A tertiary hospitals in Beijing, but could not understand the doctors' proposed plans and did not know how to choose. I suggested she buy a copy of The Mayo Clinic Breast Cancer Book, a popular-science book on breast cancer written by doctors at the Mayo Clinic in the United States. At the same time, I explained to her the necessity and importance of endocrine therapy and targeted therapy for triple-positive breast cancer, and how these two treatments should be combined with traditional surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy to achieve the best outcome. After these treatments, I explained how to choose appropriate Chinese herbal medicines as adjuvants, and which herbal medicines to avoid because they might affect the efficacy of endocrine therapy. Once I had finished, she was no longer confused.

This patient is only in her thirties, and her disease has not yet progressed to a particularly severe stage. If she receives good standardized treatment and proper subsequent Chinese medicine, her survival can extend to ten, even twenty-plus years. Her daughter is only ten years old, and she wants to be there to watch her grow up. She was terrified and distraught; the doctors she had seen before had no patience to soothe her emotions or time to explain her condition to her.

She was like someone standing before a bottomless abyss, afraid and unable to choose. Anxiety, anguish and depression had seized her; she needed someone to point the way. And I, too, hope that she, like the group of patients who came to me more than ten years ago, can still be intact and alive in this world more than a decade from now, watching her daughter grow up and fulfilling her wish.

Waiting on this group of patients, I often feel as if I am waiting on my own mother. As long as they are here, I feel my mother is here too. When they are well, my heart finds great comfort. Before Qingming, an investor from Hunan interested in investing in healthcare found me, hoping I would devote energy to researching diabetes and partner with him to open a specialized Chinese-medicine hospital for diabetes.

I told him quite directly that in the next few years I have no time or energy to think about such things, because I must continue studying and improving myself and have no room for anything else. I also have a group of cancer patients I need to wait on; I cannot abandon them, and they are equally unwilling to abandon me. Sometimes one must believe in fate; my fate is to research cancer. However terrible this disease and however hard it is to conquer, once fate has pushed a person onto this road, he should not think about escaping it; accepting it and loving this work is the best choice I can make.

I dare not hope that I will eventually become some great oncologist, but at the very least I believe I will eventually become a professional who knows the various Chinese, Western and biological knowledge related to cancer. Ten years from now I will have taken a big step up from where I am now, and the articles I write then will bring even greater value to patients. As long as I am here, many patients will not die before their time. With luck, if I can achieve even some breakthrough results in cancer research, it will inevitably benefit more people.

My mother has already passed away; the dead cannot return to life. There are also some deaths I cannot prevent. But there will always be some lives that we can save, and we should strive for them.

I am forty-four this year. When I was a child, at Qingming sacrifices, none of the ancestors buried in our family grave had ever met me; I felt nothing about death, and only thought it fun for a whole big family to run all over the hillside together. Later, my grandfather died, my grandmother died, my aunt by marriage died, my paternal uncle died, two aunts by marriage died, and my mother died. One beloved relative after another lies sleeping underground. When Qingming comes and I go to their graves to offer sacrifice, painful memories are always stirred up.

Our elders are a barrier that blocks the god of death for us. When they leave this world one after another, it is our turn to face death ourselves. Although death is an unavoidable law of nature, it is always better if a person can live a few more years and accompany his family a few more years. That is precisely the value of oncology medicine.

When I used to read Mr. Ji Xianlin's essay "A Lifetime of Eternal Regret," I would read on and on until my face was streaked with tears. From ancient times to the present, children and descendants have more or less felt this pain of "the child wishing to care for his parents, but they are no longer there." The longing for his late mother that Professor Ji expressed in that essay I can feel in my own bones. I no longer have the chance to be filial to my own mother; I can only do what I can to create, for others, more chances to accompany their own families, and in this way make up for the pain of losing my mother.

After middle age, a person's desires enter a process of decline. At first, full of hope, we want a prosperous and happy life; gradually, we only wish to be free of illness and disaster; after falling ill with an incurable disease, our wishes become even more humble—we only hope to live a few more days, and everything else no longer matters. Cancer will eventually take the lives of about one in three people, and almost every household will be touched by cancer. How many people can really remain forever only a bystander on this issue?