When I just arrived in Jakarta, my friend from Darcy phoned me asking me to visit our patients at Darcy, about 300km away from Jakarta. It is a small town in West Java and I was there in 2007 and visited several of our former patients. The hospitality they showed me touched me deeply. That was more than three years ago and how was their condition now? My heart was in some trepidation.
We reached Darcy at 1 p.m. The town has no high-rise building; the streets are narrow with shop-houses on both sides. At an intersection there was a black car waiting for us. Fang Fang told us it was driven by one of our former patients who would lead the way. Finally our car stopped in front of a furniture shop. The driver of the black car came down and opened our car door for us. I recognised he was Huang who had cervical oesophagus cancer which was non-resectable. He came to our hospital for treatment two years ago. During his hospitalization, he was given several non-surgical therapies. There was a concurrent oesophageal fistula resulting in food leakage from it. He was not given food orally but he was given nutrition infusion through tube feeding in the hope that the fistula would heal by itself. As there was insufficient food intake, he had malnutrition; not only did the fistula not heal, there was a local infection. However, since we found that the tumour had been eradicated basically, we unplugged the feeding tube and encouraged him to take food high in proteins orally. A month later, the fistula shrank significantly.
I was anxious to find out how the fistula was. Therefore while we were shaking hands, I stared at his neck. Huang immediately pointed at his left neck and said that it was all well now. He pointed at Dr. Liu Zhengping and said, “When I was discharged, there was still food fistula leakage with local festering. Thanks to Dr. Liu for dressing it for dozens of days, it was healed finally.” I noticed that there was only a small scar where the fistula was before. “Your hospital services have been extended to Indonesia,” he said.
We passed through the furniture retail section of the shop and walked up to the first floor which was about 1500 square meters in area. We went into the sitting room about 50m away. It was like a theatre with stair-like sofa surrounding it. In the middle was a big flat screen TV showing a CCTV programme. The owner was a beautiful lady about forty years old. While asking her maid to serve us some tea and fruit, she told us how her mother was. Three years ago when I came to Darcy, I had a meal with her mother. Her mother had lung cancer and had been treated in a hospital in Jakarta where she was given chemotherapy. But that round of chemotherapy almost knocked her out. She came to our hospital for treatment. The beautiful lady said, “Thanks to all of you. My mother has been fine for the past eight years.” Then an old lady came into the sitting room and walked towards me; she was the mother of the charming lady. She stayed with her son a short distance away. Upon learning that we were at her daughter’s house, she could not wait for her son to drive her here and came on feet instead. I asked her how far she walked. Pointing at the direction of her son’s house, she replied, “Not very far, only about a kilometre away. I walk here at least three times a day.”
We were invited to dine with them. We had some Fujian-style dishes such as noodles with vegetables, sweet and sour soup and steamed fish. The family migrated from Fujian about a hundred years ago and they are the third generation. They could still speak very fluent Fujian dialect. The old lady sat by my side and told me that they usually had simple food such as fish and vegetables for meals and they did not eat any pork. She ate a type of imported herbal capsules three times a day, and it cost her about 2000 Yuan a month. She hoped to live for another eight years until she was ninety years old when she would have great-grandchildren, It seems that the old lady still keeps the traditional Chinese thinking of having a big family with many children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren living together.
Half way through the meal, a couple came. I recognised that the man was an ENT specialist who had nasal cancer with cervical lymph nodes metastasis. He was admitted into our hospital for treatment and he also came for review. His wife is a beautiful Indonesian lady who worked as an air hostess before. After her husband had fallen ill, she quit her profession and became a full-time housewife to take care of the husband. I briefly examined him and found that there was a lump at the left side of his neck but it was difficult to tell whether it was lymph node metastasis or post-treatment scarring. His wife told us that he had nose bleeding occasionally but he still continued with his medical practice and was very busy at his clinic. He intended to go for immunotherapy in our hospital in the near future. She said that her husband believed in cancer dormancy. I recalled that they had recommended two patients to our hospital and I enquired from them about those two patients. She told us that one of them survived for a year and passed away while the other patient had survived for two years and had gone on a tour recently.