July 2004, I received a call from 8th floor ward asking me to see a 94 years old woman by the name of Zhang Xiangtai. 94 years old! My heart trembled on hearing that the patient was 94 years old. Hopefully, nothing happened to her! I walked to the ward and saw a white-haired old lady lying in bed moaning constantly. By her bed side was her son about 70 years old and her grandson. The grandson told me that half a month ago, his grandmother complained of great pain and her son sent her to a large hospital in Guangzhou. Upon CT examination, she was found to have lung cancer and the bone at the vicinity had been destroyed. The grandson told me that when the grandma was given treatment in that hospital, he overheard a doctor murmuring to himself that the old lady was 94 years old and he wondered whether he himself could live to that age. He prescribed a dozen of painkiller and advised us to bring the grandma back and to take good care of her. The grandson told me with an angry tone that when his grandma came home, she had severe pain especially during night time when the pain was so severe that she would scream. He said, “We, the younger generation cannot bear the sight to the suffering his grandma is going through.”
We conducted further examination on the old woman and discovered that near the rear of the right lung tumor in the 9th thoracic vertebra had damaged the right thoracic arch support. The severe back pain was due to nerve compression by the tumor. We gave her cryosurgical ablation. The pain stopped 30 minutes after cryosurgical ablation. Three days later, we injected bone cement at the damaged thoracic vertebrate. A month later, the tumor at the lung shrank by half in size. A year later, it almost disappeared completely. In 2008, four years after treatment in our hospital, I went to her eldest son’s house in Foshan. Once I was at the door, the old lady came to greet me; she took my hand and let me sit down on the sofa. Then she brought bananas, oranges and apples for me and offered me some tea. Her son told me that her mother washed her own clothes, tidied her own bed and bathed every day. She would scramble to prepare meals. The old lady asked me to spend a night there. At night, they invited me for dinner outside but I declined. His son and I bowed to put in efforts to make sure that the old lady would live up to a hundred years old, and our hospital would then give the old lady a 100th birthday celebration.
Last year, the old lady was 100 years old. Her son made a special trip to our hospital to tell us his mother was fine. They had a simple meal to celebrate her 100th birthday as family members dared not hold a grand celebration in case the old lady was too excited and suffered a heart attack. He told me somewhat apologetically that saving the life of her mother was the greatest birthday gift we gave to her.