I decided to visit our patients at their homes. My first choice were Indonesian patients and the reason was my colleague, Dr. Liu Zhengping, is our long-term resident doctor to Indonesia and he is very familiar with the condition of patients. Indonesia, the Land of Thousand Islands, is a big country with a large population of 250 million of which 15 million are Indonesian Chinese. It is a country with the largest Chinese population. For the last eight years, hundreds of Indonesian Chinese have come for cancer treatment in our hospital.
On 25th April 2010, I, accompanied by our photographer, Xiao Liao, flew to Jakarta. During our eight day’s stay there, we travelled with Dr. Liu Zhengping and Miss Fang Fang, our secretary cum interpreter by car and plane from Jakarta to Dash in West Java, to Bandung and to Medan in Sumatra and then to Surabaya, the second largest city in Indonesia. The whole journey covered a total distance of 5000 km. We visited eleven patients in their homes, interviewed sixteen patients over the phone. These patients are classified into four categories. First category consists of patients who could not undergo surgical treatment, second category comprises of patients who were given chemotherapy and radiotherapy but failed. Patients who had cancer recurrence belong to the third category and the fourth category were patients who, prior to their treatment, had been predicted to survive for less than a year.