I awoke from a nightmare, I wanted to shout, but there was something in my throat, I wanted to move my hands and feet to ease my fears but it felt like the weight of a mountain pressed down on them. I heard my wife's voice, “Kecheng, Kecheng, do not be afraid, we are by your side.” I tried to open my eyes and saw my colleagues Zuo Jiansheng, Niu Lizhi along side my good friends President Ye Ping and Director Liu Jintao from Shenzhen. I heard familiar voices say, “Good, he’s awoken.” I remembered the moment of entering the operating theatre, I didn't allow the nurses to help me, I felt I was being brave climbing onto the operating table myself. My hands were tied
down to both edges of the table flanked by nurses on either side who injected two needles into my veins which were connected to the infusion bottles hanging on both sides. In the cephalic position, Professor Lu said to me “Professor Xu, we’ll give you anesthesia and you'll fall asleep soon.” A mask covered my nose and mouth, seconds later I could hear hardly any voices at all.
I imagined a terrible scene! My belly was cut open with a long sharp knife, suddenly intestines spilled out, the knife cut so deep it scraped my aorta, blood flowed like the tide, doctors and nurses were insanely busy. One doctor tried to use my guts to block the ruptured blood vessels, but there were too many metastatic intestinal tumors, hard like stones, and they were unable to block the gap. I could hardly breathe, Professor Lu inserted another tube into my trachea, desperately stuffing it inside. I shouted out…finally I heard my wife calling me, waking me from the nightmare.
I opened my eyes and looked around, in a trance I had returned back to a new world. I looked at the stomach tube inserted from my nose, I recalled a nurse inserted it yesterday. There was a white abdominal belt tied on my stomach and several tubes, I could see they were abdominal drainage tubes. At that time it all became clear, Professor Hu had finished the surgery. I struggled to raise my head, Professor Hu appeared in front of me and said, “Xu, take it easy, the whole left liver lobe has been cut off, that object has been completely removed.”
“What's the size of the tumor?” My mind was completely clear.
“Its size is almost the same as estimated before surgery, about three centimeters.” Professor Hu gesticulated the size of a walnut.
“Any metastases?”
“No, certainly not!” Professor Hu answered surely, “I have carefully checked, there was no vascular invasion.”
Professor Hu is a very meticulous and serious person, I believed his judgment and asked “Has the pathology been done?” This was most critical as the cancer type and degree of differentiation were directly related to the prognosis.
“We've done the frozen biopsy, as you might expect, it is cholangiocarcinoma, the high-differentiated type.” Professor Hu looked very relaxed, and said, “No blood transfusion.”
He knew I was very concerned about the blood transfusion, so he specifically mentioned this. On one hand, no blood transfusion meant less bleeding during surgery which left no doubt of a quicker postoperative recovery. On the other hand, according to the research, a blood transfusion could induce cancer metastasis and recurrence. In the 1980s, I evaluated statistics on postoperative live cancer treatment results. I discovered significantly higher recurrence rates with those postoperative liver cancer groups whom received blood transfusions than those who didn't. Furthermore, the recurrence rate was in proportion to the amount of blood transfusion given. The reasons are unknown, it could be that blood transfusions inhibit immune function.
I insisted on seeing the liver tissue. The colleagues at my side looked doubtfully at Professor Hu. He said, “Well, I'll show you”. Possibly agreeing to this so that I could feel assured by what he'd just said to me.
A few minutes later, the liver tissue arrived. A piece of my liver, the left lobe, dark brown and the size of a palm. In the right hand region there was a massive grey hard nodule, the edge clearly defined, other than this there was no lesion. On the other side of the left lobe there was a blister like lesion, in my experience I judged it to be a cyst and not malignant. The liver is an indispensable organ, but it’s also a place where the highest number of diseases occurs. I pinched the liver tissue, looked at it over and over again, I couldn’t say what I felt. I was an experienced specialist and researcher of the liver organ, but it was always other people’s livers. Apart from myself, there are few other people in this world who could see and feel their own liver.