Refuse to Overdraw Your Life and Leave Room for Change

I once treated a melanoma patient with widespread metastases. He was from Zhejiang and one of the best friends of my life. He was a deeply compassionate and hardworking man; even after falling ill he kept doing high-intensity work without pause, which was a major reason his treatment ultimately failed.

He worked in finance and, in good years, earned tens of millions. He was generous, often donating a hundred thousand yuan or more to a single poor patient—one of the most generous people I have seen. He very much wanted to find a plot on Beijing's outskirts for me to grow medicinal herbs, and we discussed it. He told me he had found over 300 mu in Mentougou and wanted to rent it and give it to me as a base for growing and studying Chinese medicinal materials. I told him it would not help my research much, only scatter my energy and keep me from focusing on more valuable work, because my strengths lie in thinking and clinical practice, not in farming herbs. He saw my point and dropped it.

He had grand ambitions: he wanted to set up a real charity in China to help cancer patients, solve their financial difficulties, and give them the best service. He constantly traveled between China, North America, and Europe to expand his work. Because he had no children and was already terminal, his wish was to use his earnings to help cancer patients, especially children with cancer.

Using the Chinese patent medicines Xihuang Wan, Fufang Banmao Jiaonang, Pingxiao Pian, and a preparation I made for him, I shrank his inguinal metastatic tumor by about 80%. Before shrinking, he had trouble walking; after, he moved freely.

Shortly after starting TCM treatment with me, he decided on integrated Chinese-Western care and went to the MD Anderson Cancer Center in the U.S. for American treatment. As everyone knows, MD Anderson is the ceiling of world oncology; because he had the means, and because I myself then felt great awe for MD Anderson, I was genuinely glad he could get better treatment. He was only just over forty; if a better method could save him, it was worth trying.

But unfortunately his treatment there failed badly. After immunotherapy he aged dramatically—it was the first time I witnessed in practice how tumor-suppressor genes accelerate human aging. He also had precision radiotherapy there, then advanced oncolytic-virus therapy. The oncolytic virus made his tumor flare rapidly within about a week, and his groin was soon filled with tumor.

Throughout his treatment I kept urging him to step back from high-intensity work. When he saw me, he had several tables of guests arranged in the tea room, and after a brief consultation he had to go table to table to discuss business. Even after falling ill he could not change his habit of overdrawing his life; while being treated in the U.S., he often flew to Europe and Canada to keep expanding his business.

In his final days he finally realized he had been overdrawing his life all along. Of course, frantic overwork is not the only way to overdraw one's life. Many people overdraw their lives in various ways—some immersed in a bad habit, others stuck in negative emotions; all greatly shorten life.

Another close lymphoma patient of mine was only a few years older than I; we clicked, and my treatment of him was not bad. But he often stayed up late and smoked; as a public-security cadre he was used to staying up late at work, a huge drain on him. His wife kept begging me to persuade him to stop, but even when I required it, he could not, and in the end he too suffered a tragic rebound and relapse.

Everyone has a maximum stress threshold, which varies; our physical and psychological resilience determine how much we can bear. We should set a threshold for work and life pressure and call time when we reach it. That is why I constantly clean up my WeChat contacts and control their number. We need not be so strong as to be omnipotent, nor live flawlessly, nor overspend ourselves caring about others' judgments. My profession has given me a deep taste of the moral kidnapping the public imposes on us; people always expect us to be saints, ignoring that we too are flesh and blood. If work and life do not make us relaxed and happy, we should leave them without hesitation—especially after falling ill.

I venture that for a person over forty, a life still full of plans and schemes is a great misfortune. By modern life expectancy, a normal person lives only to about eighty; after forty one is in the second half of life and should live and work in an attitude of enjoyment. I do not mean people over forty should not work—I myself plan to work until the day I die—I mean that after forty, our work need not be so stressful.

The other day I wrote an article, "Resist Consumerism, Live a Low-Stress Life." An elderly cancer patient told me that consumerism is stressful, but if everyone resists it, the economy will not grow, there will not be enough jobs, and we cannot support so many people—what then? She is an auntie with a strong sense of social responsibility, and I at once told her not to think too much.

Society is made of countless people, and each bears a different social responsibility. Some people (most cancer patients, for instance) are already in difficulty and need society's care; they need not bear heavy social responsibility and should first look after themselves. Countless healthy people still consume, and many low-consumption people (like me) circulate wealth through charitable giving, so society is barely affected by seriously ill patients lowering their own life pressure—nothing to worry about.

Even healthy people should prevent cancer and not overdraw their bodies in work, entertainment, and consumption. When a person is overbusy and always exhausted, he will not love his work or life, nor love his relatives and friends, even coming to hate his lover and family and his own life. Because in fatigue he can no longer feel his lover's warmth or the joy of being alive.

Many people have life plans. We need only recall that a few hundred years ago few people had the various plans modern humans have; they just lived as circumstances came, to see how unreasonable life planning is. We came into the world as organisms, like any other living thing; we live one lifetime here and take nothing away when we die, so life plans are pure burden.

Living things' instinct is to adapt to the environment. Not only should we avoid rigid plans, we should exercise our innate adaptability, adjusting our state at any time in response to change. Those who leave no room for change and single-mindedly pursue their life plans easily overdraw their lives and live under heavy pressure.