This article was written on my birthday six years ago, 7/24/2013. The original writing was in Chinese, and now a English translation is available to my readers.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Today is my
birthday, a co-worker Vickie in my company asked me how I planned to celebrate; I told
her I was going to the hospital for infusion, because today also happens to be
the day of my weekly visit to the clinical trial department of City of Hope
hospital, where I’ll receive new trial medications for my stage IV kidney
cancer. In other words, I’m spending my birthday at the hospital.
There’s nothing
particularly special about the day I was born, but there are two five-year
periods relating to it which could be considered the most important - and
oddest - periods of my life.
61 years ago, when
I was no more than a few-month-old fetus sitting peacefully in my young
mother’s womb, I accompanied her into Qingdao’s heavily-guarded, terrifying Licun
Chinese Prison. This prison was built in 1903 by a German company Baufirma F.
H. Schmidt (Chinese name Guangbao Company). It was originally for the purpose to
imprison Chinese criminals during the German occupation of Qingdao. After
Chinese communists won the civil war in 1949, it became a notorious facility to
imprison the “counter-revolutionists” in Qingdao.
Because Licun
Prison had no medical facilities, the day I was born, my mother was “humanely”
sent back home to give birth to me, and then she was taken back to Licun Prison
to continue serving her jail term.
I came wailing into
this world 61 years ago today; during my first five years of life I didn’t have
a single opportunity to suckle my mother’s milk, and was instead brought up by
the loving Christian sisters of the church. It wasn’t until five years later
that my mother left prison, and I was once again able to return to her embrace.
What was it that
created this tragedy, forcing a young mother to leave her own flesh and blood
and sit in a gloomy prison for five long years, experiencing torment to both
her physical and mental well-being? During those turbulent years, with China
fighting through a seemingly interminable class struggle, I was never given a
single explanation.
When my mother died
in China 25 years ago, I began investigating the secret of that tragic
experience from our past; after some effort, I finally managed to uncover the
startling secret of the day of my birth.
In the early 1950’s,
aside from raising children and being a housewife, my mother also gave sermons
at “God’s Church”, a small Christian church on Guangyao Road (now Dengzhou
Road) in Qingdao. One Sabbath Sunday, an elder of the church brought an
unfamiliar youth to meet her after she’d finished her sermon. This youth
claimed to be a student at Qingdao’s naval academy, and needed 30 yuan for train
tickets to visit his elderly, ailing mother in Sichuan province. My kindhearted
mother felt no suspicion at all, promptly donating 30 yuan to this youth she’d
never met before.
According to the
sentence the Qingdao People’s Court gave to my mother at the time, this youth
was actually someone who’d been conscripted by the Nationalist Party and sent
to the Qingdao Naval Academy. The Communist People’s Liberation Army had taken
over this national military academy after establishing themselves in Qingdao in
1949, but this youth who’d been forcefully conscripted into the army was unable
to bear the torment of homesickness, and had come up with the idea of
abandoning his post to return home. This naive young man never would have
imagined that with this hasty action, not only would he have committed the “heinous”
crime of desertion, but would also involve my mother, who’d so kindly donated
his travel fare.
Just like this,
because my mother had given a stranger an insignificant 30 yuan (approximately
equal to 5 US dollars today), she received a criminal charge of “Undermining
the Chinese People’s Navy” and a sentence of five years in prison. And I,
sitting in her womb, spent most of my ten months as a fetus in that gloomy and
terrifying Licun Prison.
My mother, because
she’d donated five dollars, suffered five years in prison. Having followed her
in as a fetus, I was separated from her embrace immediately after birth, unable
to see her for the first five years of my life. It’s hard to say how many
similarly unbelievable tragedies happened during the years of that “red
terror”...
Coincidentally,
this same day five years ago was also the day I left the hospital after my very
first surgery to remove my left kidney, as well as my first post-surgery
birthday. From that point onward I’ve treated this day as my second birth, the
day I began a new life. And the seasons have now passed five times in this new
life.
At first, the surgeon had surgically removed both a fist-sized malignant tumor and my left kidney, all in one sweep.
Unexpectedly, my fate was to be an unfortunate one; barely four months after
the first surgery, the cancer tumors rapidly spread again, soon invading upon
one of the most important organs in the human body—my pancreas. When Dr. Smith,
the head surgeon at UCLA’s urology department, told me the grievous news that
the cancer had spread to my pancreas, I burst into tears, my mind flooded with
grief.
The overwhelming majority of patients
diagnosed with pancreatic cancer are already in the late stages, beyond any
viable help, and can do nothing but wait helplessly for death. Over 90% of
patients will die within the year, with only 10-25% of them being lucky enough
for the doctor to consider surgery - though the recovery rate for those who do
get surgery is very low. As I took my first step towards death, God extended a
hand of His compassion. In the City of Hope Hospital, a surgeon, Doctor
Eilenhower, consented to perform a complex surgery known as the Whipple
procedure on me. Dr. Eilenhower was candid with me about this Whipple procedure,
which has a five year survival rate of up to 25%. Because the pancreas was hidden deep in a
person’s upper-left abdominal cavity, surgical removal of the organ was
extremely difficult; throughout the history of his own surgical career, he’d
only performed Whipple surgery for pancreatic tumors eight or nine times.
Although he didn’t have an absolute handle of the situation, he was still
willing to exhaust all his knowledge and experience in putting me under his
care.
This was both an extremely difficult and
extremely dangerous surgery. Dr. Eilenhower displayed his top-grade surgical
skills and plentiful clinical experience during an operation which extended to
become six hours long. The pancreas is a long, flat gland of tiny size, around
12cm in length and 2.5cm in width. It weighs only 80 grams. Because it’s
positioned in the back of the abdomen’s upper-left side, a pancreatectomy is
like penetrating into a tiger’s den, faced with a myriad of difficult
challenges as you cross the liver, stomach, duodenum, spleen—layer upon layer
of internal organs. To get straight to the point, Dr. Eilenhower needed to fish
out all my innards in order to reach that position deep in the back of my
abdominal cavity, just to start the task of removing my pancreas.
Just like that, one morning around six months
after my first surgery, my naked body was once more pushed onto a cold and
frightening operating table. As the anesthetist began administering anesthesia,
I couldn’t resist silently letting out a tearful sigh: When I was a baby, I
arrived wailing and naked in this world; after experiencing a short and bumpy
series of changes in this mortal life, I was now naked and lingering around the
valley of death.
The anesthesia slowly flowed into my veins. As
I was on the verge of sinking into unconsciousness, a solemn Bible verse
appeared within my head: “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken
from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.” (Matthew 26:39)
Through the haze, I could feel myself slowly
recovering consciousness. I woke from my anesthesia-induced sleep to find
myself in the intensive care ward of the surgical unit. The first thing to
appear in my cloudy vision was what appeared to be a pair of angelic
silhouettes in red. As the blurry images gradually became clearer, I saw that
it was my wife and my sister Angela, wearing red clothes and smiling. The clock
hanging on the wall behind them silently pointed out that six hours had passed.
My sixth sense immediately told me that God’s graceful hand had not taken my
“cup” away. I was still alive: The surgery was a success!
Sixty-one years ago today, my wrongfully
imprisoned mother gave birth to me, and the two of us suffered through five
years of separation. Five years ago today, God guided me out of the valley of
death, giving me a second chance at life, and caused the doctor’s original
one-year sentence to extend all the way to today. Having experienced the
unrestrained ups and downs of life, I now hold a profound belief—that enlightenment
is everywhere, and that this day is no coincidence.
Five years have passed, and most of my fellow
kidney cancer patients have since left this mortal coil, making me an
incredibly rare surviving “endangered species” in the eyes of the doctors. My
case has become a never-before-seen spectacle among clinical trial reports.
Originally written in Chinese by Joseph Chang on July 24, 2013
Translated to English by Ida von Mizaner on July 16, 2019
Edited by Joseph Chang on July 24, 2019
