According to Professor Hu’s suggestions, I accepted the hepatic resection as the tumor was in the left hepatic lobe, losing about 25% of my entire liver.
I remembered in the early 1960’s when I was still a medical student reading an article in the school newspaper about our teacher doing a hepatic resection and how we felt delighted with his achievements. Half a century later and who would have thought that what was once considered quite a difficult surgery would be performed on me. Life really feels like an unpredictable dream.
Four days before the spring festival on the 26th of January, I was admitted to the hospital as a patient. That morning a doctor came and asked me my medical history. I had the routine physical exam, an eletrocardiogram exam, routine blood test and blood serum electrolytes test. At noon I ate a bowl of congee, steamed egg and a small amount of vegetable soup then fell asleep. At three o’clock the attending doctor came and told me that tomorrow they would operate performing a left hepatic lobectomy. He let me look at the Informed Consent for Surgery Form. Written in pen under the heading “Surgery Complications” was bleeding, organ damage, postoperative infection, wound dehiscence, non healing wound and so on. The attending doctor apologetically said, “Mr. Xu, this is all routine, I'm sorry.” When I was a young doctor I also often had to carry
out pre-operative consent. Although I'm now a senior physician, the president of a hospital and the surgeon carrying out my surgery is an expert and friend of mine, no doctor can guarantee that there will be no accidents. As soon as you decide to have surgery you accept the risks. I readily signed.
At five that afternoon the anesthesiologist came in, introducing me to the anesthesia type, the possible accidents such as cardiac arrest, respiratory suppression, shock and allergic reactions and so on. I signed again.
My hand seemed heavy when I signed the anesthesia consent form. In the past I'd had light anesthesia whilst undergoing a gastroscopy exam. But this time with a tube inserted into my trachea the anesthesia would be protracted. If you were to say that the success of the operation hinged on the surgeon’s knowledge, comprehension and skill, then the operation’s safety mainly hinged on the anesthesia. Administrating anesthesia to me was Professor Lu, an expert in anesthesia. I trusted her skills. But there are lots of unknown factors. In the 1970s there was an important figure’s younger sister who was a patient having surgery. Shanghai’s most famous anesthetist gave her anesthesia, but mistook laughing gas for oxygen and she died on the spot. The anesthetist was transferred to work in a poor area until the important figure fell from power. Although the patient’s brother after a public trail was judged as a heinous criminal, she herself was innocent. The anesthetist was not only innocent of political conspiracy, he took the task very seriously
trying to be clever and ended up with a fatal error. So when reading the anesthesia consent form, I thought about all these things and my heart couldn't help palpitating.
I had a bowl of porridge and half a duck egg for dinner then followed the doctor’s orders and began fasting from eight that evening. My wife accompanied me to the hospital, we had a tacit understanding that the best comfort for me was not to say anything to each other. I took the sleeping pill Nitrazepam and quickly fell asleep. I dreamt I had finished my surgery and the tumor was not malignant but benign and everyone congratulated me. I was happy, laughing heartily then my wife woke me up. It was already five in the morning. But I really considered the object in my liver and based on my knowledge and experience of liver disease, I guessed the object was malignant. But because it was slow growing it was possibly not the typical liver cell carcinoma but the relatively rare cholangiocarcinoma.
At seven in the morning a nurse inserted a gastric tube for me. The procedure went smoothly with my cooperation, the tube entered the stomach after a few seconds. A nursing staff from the operation room pushed a stretcher in and I climbed on. Taking off my watch I handed it to my son telling him, “Take care of your mother.” My head was suddenly filled with scenes of bleeding, respirator’s and doctor’s nervously rescuing patients. I felt like jumping off the stretcher and escaping from having the surgery. On both sides of the stretcher were my family and colleagues just wanting to say a few words to me, but there was no time I had been pushed into the operating theatre, into a restricted zone, a place where any unknown conditions could occur.