by Weijian Shan
I was disgusted to see the commander’s contented smile in the midst of the women. I thought it would be best if I left.
The next day, I came back and examined the instructor’s knees. I was puzzled by what I found. Everything seemed to be all right. His reflexes were excellent. But he said that his knees were very painful and that he had had this condition for many years. He also told me that he regularly took the aspirin prescribed for him by Dr. Yin. But he was reluctant to submit to a blood test. “Why don’t you just give me acupuncture from time to time?” he suggested.
I did give him acupuncture that day, but I did not feel that I really knew what I was doing since I did not understand what his problem was. I told Dr. Yin about my puzzlement, and he simply said that acupuncture should be good for the instructor.
The next day, Instructor Zhang came to our platoon and told me in front of everyone how much better he felt after the acupuncture. When he left, Li Baoquan said that the political instructor should thank him because he had acted as my acupuncture guinea pig.
Soon after, we received an order from the regiment that everyone should be tested to find out their blood type as part of our preparations for war, in case there was a need for a blood transfusion. For two days we were busy drawing blood samples. I made sure to take a little extra from the instructor because I wanted to see how bad his arthritis was.
I tested his blood twice. Both times, the result turned out negative. The test for arthritis was the simplest of all tests, and there was no way I could have made a mistake. That turtle egg (a term of endearment similar to “son of a bitch”) did not have arthritis at all. He was just inventing a reason not to go to the fields. That pot-bellied lazy pig. Hypocrite. He was even worse than the company commander, who did not pretend to need an excuse not to work. I felt stupid for having spent so much time thinking about how to treat him.
I went to tell Dr. Yin what I had found. He said indifferently that he had told me the instructor was in excellent health. No wonder he was not interested. He had known this all along.
I told some friends the story about the political instructor. Everybody agreed that the instructor was the biggest turtle egg under heaven. But all of them advised me to keep quiet about it.
“The Monkey King could not somersault out of the Buddha’s palm,” Li Baoquan said. “Instructor Zhang could make your life miserable if you offend him. If he wants you to treat him again, just plant your needles on all the wrong points and let that turtle egg have a good time.” Fortunately, the instructor did not ask me for acupuncture again. I thought that either Dr. Yin had told him what I had found or he thought he had already achieved his purpose by letting everyone know that I had treated his arthritis. For weeks, I thought all the time about what I should say if he came back. I could not stop thinking about what a turtle egg he was.
* * *
The clinic was always busy between work and curfew times, especially after dinner. Some complaints varied with season and weather, but most remained constant throughout the year. The most frequent problems included stomachache, dysentery, back pain, arthritis, frostbite, heatstroke, heartburn, head colds, and minor gynecological problems such as cramps.
It was simple enough to treat most of these common issues, but it was difficult to eliminate the causes. Stomachache and dysentery were caused by bad food and unclean water—all our water was contaminated by dirt as well as human and animal waste. The kitchen usually boiled its water first, but when we were working in the fields we often had no choice but to drink from ditches. In summer, stomach problems were routine.
We sometimes tried to use traditional Chinese medicine to prevent diseases. We put alum into the water to make the mud sink to the bottom. In summer, I would collect the stems of eggplants, dry them in the sun, and store them for use in winter. The liquid from boiled eggplant stems was effective for frostbite. But most diseases were caused by poor living conditions and hard labor, which could not be prevented.
Occasionally, there were more severe cases of illness. The first really sick patient I treated was Cui Xianchao. He came down with a high fever and was vomiting constantly. At first, I thought it was just a common cold and gave him some aspirin and other drugs to relieve his symptoms. Overnight, his case worsened. He coughed so hard that he could not sleep—and neither could the people who shared his room.
Soon Cui became severely dehydrated, and Dr. Yin ordered that he be given an intravenous transfusion of normal saline and penicillin injections. I also gave him injections of metamizole sodium, known as analgene, to relieve his fever and pain. Because he needed full-time attention, I was excused from going to the fields. I nursed him as he lay there panting. I read him books out loud and, when he was up to it, we would discuss the contents.
No sooner had Cui Xianchao recovered than Liu Xiaotong became sick. He had such a severe toothache that he could not eat or sleep. His left cheek was so swollen that his face was distorted. His gums bled. But there was nothing we could do other than give him antibiotics. He urgently needed to see a dentist.
The nearest one was with the division hospital in Urat Qianqi. With Dr. Yin’s help, I secured the permission of the political instructor to take him there. But the truck that brought our food from Urat Qianqi every two weeks would not arrive for a week, and the company leaders did not think that an illness as insignificant as a toothache was worth dispatching a special truck. So poor Xiaotong had to wait.
While we were waiting, Xiaotong was absolutely miserable. He moaned constantly, both hands over his swollen face. To relieve his pain and give him a few hours of sleep, I gave him injections of dolantin, the strongest analgesic we had. But after a few days, I had to stop because I was afraid he might become addicted.
It seemed there had to be something else I could do to relieve the pain, and I consulted some traditional Chinese medicine books. In one of them, I found a remedy for toothache in the form of the poisonous yellow liquid a toad squirts from its warts when threatened. Since the liquid was poisonous, the book warned, it had to be used sparingly and carefully.
Xiaotong, desperate, was quite willing to try the “toad treatment.” So I went out and captured a large grotesque-looking toad and put him in a washbasin. I gently touched his back with a cotton swab. I could see he was unhappy: his belly started to grow. I applied a little more pressure, palpating the warts. Suddenly, yellowish liquid squirted out. The force of it was such that some of the goo landed on my hand. I immediately swabbed up the rest. Xiaotong, standing by, opened his mouth and allowed me to spread the “medicine” along his gums.
After a bit, he announced that his gums were numb. The medicine worked. Encouraged, I collected more yellow ooze in the same way. Unfortunately, the toad became uncooperative after a while. There was no way that I could preserve this “toad product,” and Xiaotong’s numbness lasted only a short while. After several days of this unorthodox treatment, Xiaotong and I gave up, concluding that Western medicine was more convenient, and did not taste nearly as bad.
One day, Dr. Yin asked me to give an intramuscular injection to a young woman of the Fifth Platoon. She had been in bed for several days. Dr. Yin could not find anything wrong with her and concluded that she was suffering from hysteria. But when the pain attacked, she rolled around, sometimes falling onto the floor if no one caught her. Several people had to hold her down for the injection of pain reliever.
This went on for several days, and I became uneasy about the therapy. I suspected that her pain was probably more psychological than physical, and that the injections were probably more effective on her mental state than anything else. I decided to try something different.
I took a syringe filled with saline and a little harmless vitamin B12 and went to her dormitory. The liquid vitamin B12 was an unusual pink. I told her we had just got hold of some imported medicine that was exactly right for her. I asked her to steel herself, because this special medicine would be painful when injected. She grew tense and made an excuse to
avoid the treatment. But I insisted, telling her this would take care of her condition. The placebo effect worked. This was the last we heard of her pain. She was cured once and for all.
As Construction Army Corps soldiers, we were privileged to receive free medical care. We barefoot doctors were poorly trained, but at least we could provide basic care and administer some medications. If the problem was beyond our skill, we could send the patient to a hospital. But for the local peasants, medicine was a luxury. They had to pay if they came to our clinics, for they were not part of the same administrative system. Many of them had never been to a doctor in their entire lives.
One day, when Dr. Yin happened to be away, I was on duty when a local peasant mother in her thirties came in with a three-year-old boy in her arms. The little boy’s face was red, his lips were blistered, and his eyes were tightly closed. He was hot to the touch and had a high fever. The woman was crying. I could tell at a glance that the boy was at risk of dying. His mother said he had been having convulsions.
Normally we would send a seriously ill patient to the division hospital in Urat Qianqi. But I was afraid that the child would not survive a bumpy journey in a tractor or truck, even if we could find such a vehicle. I decided I had to treat him myself.
As I examined the boy, I was filled with fear, knowing he could die at any moment, literally in my hands. But I did not have time to be afraid. I listened to his lungs and could hear the moist rale and shallow respiration through the stethoscope. His pulse was weak and rapid. I concluded that he was suffering from lobar pneumonia.
The most urgent thing was to bring down the fever and stop the convulsions. I also had to apply antibiotics to stop the respiratory infection. I sent someone to fetch Gao Xiaorong, my fellow barefoot doctor, and set to work.
The clinic had only two little rooms, one of which served as a pharmacy and the other as a treatment room. There was nowhere I could ask the mother to go, so I let her stay in the room. Between sobs, she told me she had not come earlier because she had no money to pay for a doctor.
Gao Xiaorong came rushing in. She had become a barefoot doctor two years earlier than I and was more experienced. She agreed with my diagnosis and plan, and we set to work.
A test of the boy’s leucocyte count, a type of infection-fighting white blood cell, confirmed my diagnosis. We gave him an injection of analgene to bring down the fever. Gao gave him a skin test to determine if he was allergic to penicillin and streptomycin. We were both holding our breath because if he were, we would be out of options. But he was negative, and we gave him a large injection of a combination of both antibiotics. Then we put him on intravenous transfusions of both normal saline and glucose. Throughout this process, the boy did not utter a single cry. I became more and more scared. What if our treatment failed? We had no backup plan. He could die if this did not work.
Now we had to wait for results. The mother had been sad when she first came in, but now she looked frightened. I allowed her to come and sit by her child, but seeing all the tubes, she dared not touch him. I felt pretty desperate, too. All I could think was, “Please don’t die.”
Gao Xiaorong and I took turns bathing the boy’s body with alcohol-soaked cotton to help bring down the temperature. While I was not doing anything, I held his hand as if to inject energy from my body into his.
To our delight, the boy’s temperature started to subside shortly before dinner and the convulsions stopped. The mother stopped sobbing. By bedtime, his breathing and pulse had become less rapid and slowly normalized. We gave him more antibiotics. At nightfall, the mother was calm enough to go back to her village to report the news to her family.
I stayed with the boy throughout the night and added to the transfusion bottle several times. Shortly after dawn, Gao came and told me to get some sleep. I was so tired that I fell asleep despite the noise of the day. It was midmorning when I woke up again.
I could hear people talking before I reached clinic door. I rushed inside to find the boy awake, his big head leaning weakly against the pillow. His mother was showing him a homemade toy. I knew he was out of danger.
The fever came back that afternoon, but only briefly. The antibiotics proved to be effective on this child who had never been exposed to any medication before.
It turned out that his father was a horse-cart driver who was away on some business. I could imagine how devastating it would have been if the boy had died in his absence. I felt grateful that the child had lived, although I was not sure to whom I should be grateful.
The mother wanted to bring the boy home, fearing a longer stay would be too expensive. But I could not let this boy go yet. After consulting with Gao, we told the mother the treatment would be free. I told her to bring the boy back whenever he got sick and there would be no charge. Nobody would know if we had used the medicine on an Army Corps soldier or on somebody else.
The boy was shy and would not talk to anyone but his mother. But he had a rapid recovery and by the third day did not want to stay in bed. When he went home a few days later, he was a healthy little boy, if a bit weak.
* * *
At that time, the newspapers were reporting miraculous “newly emerging things” as a result of applying “invincible Mao Zedong Thought.” In medicine in particular, there were many such stories. A People’s Liberation Army medical unit used acupuncture to cure the mute and the deaf, for example. The newspapers said that the first words these formerly mute people spoke were, “Long live Chairman Mao.” There were reports of discoveries of new acupuncture points to cure all types of diseases. Even the official Manual for Barefoot Doctors had a special section on “new acupuncture therapies.”
Naturally, I read about these developments with keen interest, although I remained skeptical. For curing the mute and the deaf, for example, the newspapers reported that the doctors applied acupuncture needles to points behind the neck, which traditional practice specifically warned against as extremely dangerous. But there were other new therapies that seemed less dangerous. One of them was “rooster blood therapy,” which became popular among people who had chronic diseases. The therapy involved drawing blood from a rooster and injecting it into humans. One of our neighbors in Beijing had bought a large rooster for that purpose. But the neighbors complained about his crowing, so the old lady had to make a muzzle for the poor cock.
Although I was skeptical of such discoveries, I was curious, too. One day Gao Xiaorong told me that Zhang Fengmei, the company bookkeeper and a good friend of hers, had learned of a new therapy that she wanted to try.
Zhang Fengmei was a reasonably good-looking woman from Tianjin. She had a mild case of acne that embarrassed her greatly. Others would not have admitted that this bothered them, because concern about appearance was regarded as bourgeois. But she was close with Gao and had asked her to find a cure. Gao had mentioned it to me, but all I could find in books was a recommendation to eat less fat and more fruits and vegetables. Of course, in the Gobi there was hardly any fat in our diet and we almost never saw fruit.
The new treatment that Zhang Fengmei had read about was “self-blood therapy.” It involved having about five cc’s of blood drawn from one’s own veins and immediately injecting it into one’s posterior. I had no idea what the scientific basis for this was, but Zhang was quite determined to try it. Gao knew that I liked to try new things and asked me to help.
Gao and Zhang were very careful to keep the operation a secret. I appreciated their trust and the fact that they had involved me in this conspiracy, and I was eager to find out if this was indeed a miracle cure, since many others in the company also had acne. When we were ready, Gao explained the procedure to Zhang and told her not to be bashful because she would have to pull her pants down as soon as we drew the blood from her arm.
I was nervous and excited. I also felt funny about the “logic” behind this. I just could not figure out what the difference was between having the blood in one’s veins and in one’s posterior muscles. Would it stimu
late some kind of immune reaction? Anyhow, there was no harm trying, or so I thought.
Zhang was very cooperative and the procedure was completed in about three minutes. In the days following, we repeated the same treatment several times. For the next few weeks, I would stare at Zhang’s face whenever I saw her to see if her problem was cured. To my disappointment, there did not seem to be any difference. Discouraged, Zhang gave up. But I have had my eyes open for a cure for acne ever since, and I still haven’t found a truly effective therapy in spite of many claims.
Some people who had been diagnosed as chronically sick had received permission to return to their home cities. Such permission had to be issued by the division hospital, where there were trained doctors and testing facilities. But there were many ways to fool a doctor. For example, one could go home if one had tuberculosis, and people devised a way to fool the X-ray machine: They put tincture of iodine on a piece of adhesive plaster and put it on their backs; iodine absorbs X-rays and leaves a shadow resembling tuberculosis. It was only after this method became common knowledge that a stop was put to it. All X-rays had to be taken from several angles to make sure the “TB” had not been taped on.
The most dramatic success in obtaining a permanent return home due to illness permit was achieved by a boy named Wang Kang.
One day, one of his roommates asked Dr. Yin to come check Wang Kang’s leg, which had stopped moving completely. Dr. Yin checked the involuntary responses and found everything normal. But Wang said that he no longer felt that his leg existed. Dr. Yin thought it might be another case of hysteria and decided to try the same trick I had used with the girl from the Fifth Platoon. But still the boy’s leg would not move. After two weeks of this, there was clear muscular atrophy: his leg had visibly shrunk. Puzzled and concerned, Dr. Yin sent him to the division hospital.