preface
In the past decade, the incidence of ovarian cancer in China has increased by 30 per cent and the mortality rate by about 20 per cent. Despite the current lack of effective screening methods, Chinese doctors are distressed by the lack of cancer knowledge. Professional doctors suggest that people with a family history of cancer, especially family members with a history of breast cancer, colorectal cancer, ovarian cancer, must have a “high-risk population” awareness, regular gynecological examinations.
“After the operation, I stayed at my cousin’s house to recuperate. One day, my boyfriend came to visit me at my cousin’s house, and they both had a drink. I heard my cousin crying and begging him not to leave me. ‘
Lying on her bed, Ye Ping, 26, told her story to the qq group. The moment she heard the conversation in her room, she fully understood, “Six months ago, I just lost a job, and now I will lose my love.”
Ye ping was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in July, and the older members of the group tried to reassure her as if she had been there before. Similar experiences are repeated over and over again in this particular group.
Group argues that DJ with ovarian cancer fighting for six years, in the ward mates eyes is regarded as “spiritual leader” of women, rich medical knowledge, temperament moderate, but for from emotional shock, she also failed to escape – two years ago, her husband formally separated, the first couple of fate also because of the disease, come to an end.
“He’s got people out there, kids.” “I’ve been married for 20 years, and I didn’t think it would end this way,” Ms. Zhang said, as if speaking of a long-gone memory.
The fear of being caught off guard
Ye Ping was once an abandoned orphan. It was her adoptive father who picked her up from under the bridge and brought her home.
She was the only one on whom my adoptive father had been single all his life. Ye Ping is slim and beautiful after growing up. In June this year, she just passed a job interview in a bank. Her boyfriend, whom her friend introduced to her, was also very affectionate and proposed to her. In her words, “The first half of this year was a bit of a dream come true.”
But July entry physical examination of a paper results, let ignorant Ye Ping, began to understand the cruelty of fate. She was diagnosed with ovarian lesions, at the beginning just think “should be an ovarian cyst”, do a small operation, cut off, but also let her boyfriend to help hide the family and friends. When she woke up from the anaesthetic, she found the bed surrounded by people with “red eyes”.
Lying on the bed of ye Ping still wonder: “a small operation just, you one is how?”
From this moment on, the already sensitive and thoughtful girl began to experience several times the intensity of her previous emotional experiences in recent months.
Even for Zhang, who works as a medical worker, the diagnosis six years ago came as no surprise.
“I had a pain in my right abdomen. At first I thought it was appendicitis. Antibiotic hanged a lot, the skin is dry, but still come menstruation is painful, feel really wrong, just go to ovarian side to think.”
On another examination, she found the chocolate public of ovary. Since then, on her doctor’s advice, Zhang has had annual gynecological check-ups and has found no signs of disease. By 2013, Zhang had noticed that her waistline was expanding and “it was useless to tuck in” until she felt a lump in her abdomen.
The diagnosis came down and she was diagnosed with 3C (advanced stage) ovarian cancer. The chocolate cyst had developed malignant lesions. “I heard a friend who was a gynecologist in Zhuhai tell me that the incidence of chocolate cysts was very high, but I didn’t take it to heart. It turned out to be a prophecy.”
The reaction of Ye Ping and Zhang Xiaoling at the time of diagnosis is the norm for the vast majority of ovarian cancer patients.
Little do they know that ovarian cancer is the leading cause of death among the three gynecological malignancies. In the absence of a mature method for early diagnosis, more than half of patients arrive at the clinic with advanced ovarian cancer, with recurrence rates as high as 70 percent. Less than half of patients live longer than five years.
The disease of “lingering”
After the diagnosis, Ye Ping began a long journey of chemotherapy.
The usual way for Ye Ping to go to the city to see a doctor is: early in the morning, she needs to take a tricycle from the village to Zhenghe County, and then transfer a bus to Wuyi Shandong High-speed railway station. After arriving in Fuzhou by high-speed train, I will transfer to the city bus or carpool with others to go to Fuzhou Cancer Hospital. Usually, it is after two o ‘clock in the afternoon when we arrive at the hospital. When she returned home, she would have to go through the same ordeal again.
He had spent his whole life farming in the mountains and cutting bamboo for a living. He could not understand the Putonghua spoken by the doctor, let alone the medical procedures in big hospitals. So far, the longest trip ye Ping has made alone from home is to have an ovarian biopsy in fuzhou, the provincial capital. After the diagnosis of ovarian cancer, her surgery was finally performed in Nanping, “because to go to Fuzhou is to take a bus to Jian ‘ou, there is a bus to Go to Nanping, more than two hours each way.
It was the first time she had heard of the “chemotherapy” recommended by her doctor after surgery. The doctor explained, “it’s like pumping a bottle,” and she was relieved. Her aunt had helped her find out from the village that someone in nearby Bomey had had uterine cancer. “Even if I had had my uterus, ovaries and accessories removed, and then had chemotherapy, I am still ok now,” she said.
However, once or twice the “injection” is not good, the girl was more than minded, the Internet to ask the doctor in Shanghai. The online doctor replied, “Ovarian cancer is so aggressive that without chemotherapy it can spread widely to the pelvis within two years.”
The natural fear of cancer, the limitations of realistic medical technology, and the hopelessness of a future life make many ovarian cancer patients anxious from the start. After diagnosis, the first reaction is often horizontal under a heart, “smashed pot for sale also want to treat”. Try all kinds of folk remedies, for all hearsay with a try to try the mentality.
Zhang Xiaoling, a doctor who had been ill for a long time, saw this clearly: “We all have a common mistake. We don’t know that this disease is prone to relapse, so we should be prepared for a long period of resistance. If you burn out quickly at the beginning, it’s easy to break down later.”
From the diagnosis to now, Zhang Xiaolin experienced 1 operation and 8 times of chemotherapy. Although she tried to choose imported chemotherapy drugs, all kinds of adverse reactions, such as hair loss and bone marrow suppression, were still as many as before.
In six years, Zhang xiaoling’s total medical expenses exceeded 400,000 yuan. She has posted about her treatment on Tianya.cn. As a head nurse, her post attracted a lot of attention from fellow patients. Later, she set up the QQ group, which has more than 120 friends and family members from all over the country.
Xiaoling zhang took pains to new patients every day with all kinds of common problems, such as, “chemotherapy is not necessarily every time is 21 days, also may be 30 days, or longer”, because in the process of specific treatment, according to the patient’s individual difference, need to consider long-term chemotherapy could cause of liver damage.
She repeatedly advised patients who had the condition that “liver protection drugs and white acupuncture should not be stopped.” In addition to protect liver medicine, “every time after chemotherapy, 8 to 14 days is a bone marrow suppression peak, eat what five red soup, this kind of food therapy is too late, want to anticipate first dozen rise white needle.”
In the course of long-term treatment, Zhang xiaoling also did 14 courses of “immunotherapy”, each of which cost about 20 or 30 thousand yuan. “It’s the kind of therapy that killed Wei Zexi, denounced on the Internet. I have a friend who is engaged in bio-medical treatment in the United States. He said that foreign countries do have cellular immunotherapy, but we use this in China, which foreigners have already eliminated.”
In addition, as there have been no new drugs for first-line clinical treatment in ovarian cancer in China in the past 30 years, there are also many patients who are trying to find newly marketed targeted drugs in foreign countries through black market or underground channels, or even to find self-made life-saving drugs made from raw drug powder.
In Fuzhou, Ye Ping had chemotherapy for five consecutive days. She had to lie in bed from 9 am to 6 PM every day, and had to order take-out food to appease her hunger during lunch. Fortunately, the first chemotherapy did not have many adverse reactions, she just had a poor appetite and felt weak. A fellow patient told her she had to eat more, “or the white blood cells will drop.” The packed lunch became a feast for her eyes and she swallowed hard.
Staring at the ceiling, she worried more about money.
She had felt this anxiety once before: when she had just started her job, her adoptive father went into the mountains to cut bamboo, hurt his foot, and had to pay for hospital admission. “At that time, I did the kindergarten general affairs, there is no way, so I temporarily misappropriated the money from the public accounts. Reimbursement comes down to the hospital, make up again go up. Because my father earned money for me to study, kindergarten, basically no savings. When you are sick, you feel helpless. That was the first time I felt the need to save a little money and the desire to make money grew.”
For Ye Ping, the five rounds of chemotherapy are just the beginning. A patient named “Rongrong” in Zhang’s QQ group has been fighting cancer for five years and has undergone 32 courses of chemotherapy. On her final chemotherapy last September, she was hit by a car accident on the way home and her son’s arm was broken. She lamented that she “can’t die if you want to”, which makes people feel like crying.
“Ovarian cancer is a lingering disease.” “Compared with other malignant tumors, ovarian cancer has a longer course of disease and is not easy to cure,” Said Sun Li, a doctor of oncology at Peking Union Medical College, in an interview. “Patients will seek treatment repeatedly, and it is not uncommon for patients to give up treatment due to the overwhelming burden.”
Zhang xiaoling also agreed: “When a lot of patients just found the disease, they will go all out to treat, even bankrupt. But what they don’t expect is that they will need adequate ‘food’ reserves in the long run. Otherwise, they will not be able to solve the problem if they empty their homes at once.”
A lover’s betrayal
Zhang xiaoling unexpected is, in the long struggle with the disease, endure so much pain, but finally did not survive the family brought the blow.
This in 3 grade a hospital served as head nurse for more than 10 years, in the other people look very tough woman, once stood in the cancer hospital in the midst of the patient and family members in hot water for countless times, thought to see more life and death in the world, also saw through the human feelings.
She was also very optimistic record himself against the hardship of ovarian cancer: “said chemotherapy, in my personal record, step by step to complete, in the form of the countdown to the fourth from bottom, also in WeChat shout ‘task more than half, back on the streets’ slogan, but who would know, finally it was family stepped on one foot.”
After finding ovarian disease 14 years ago, Zhang Xiaoling began to use some drugs that can lead to menopause, so under the age of 40, entered the menopause ahead of time. “Sex is definitely not as perfect as it used to be. A lot of people don’t expect that our fellow patients will talk about what lubricants durex has and recommend them to each other.”
Zhang, on the other hand, had tolerated her husband’s early signs of infidelity years ago, “as if he just wanted to have fun.”
From the diagnosis of ovarian cancer to the treatment and recovery, it was once seen by outsiders as a process to warm up their relationship, and zhang also used it as an opportunity to win back their relationship. “I said blessing in disguise, because I thought his care for me might make him take it back and return to his family,” zhang said.
More than a year after the operation, husband and wife feeling really also improve, in the eyes of others, Zhang Xiaoling’s husband accompanied her every day to go out to have a rest, in and out of the town of all kinds of social occasions, people around even began to envy her in the serious illness can be so good care.
However, in March 2015, her husband suddenly proposed a formal separation, zhang xiaolin like a thunderbolt, which made her from the rehabilitation process to gain 140 kg, “three months all at once back to 120 kg”. More than two years later, Zhang still broke down in tears at this point. “After all, after 20 years of marriage, I didn’t think it would end like this,” she said.
On a practical level, if she decides to give up her marriage, it will be directly related to the decline of her treatment skills — her weakened financial ability will force her to give up many costly treatments, “feeling that everything she has worked so hard for is gone, and that she becomes an outcast in the family she built.”
She recalls once seeing a photo on Weibo of a man with the name “Full baby face” : a woman who had shaved her head and was undergoing chemotherapy lay on a hospital bed, expressionless, and her in-laws decided to give up treatment. Her parents-in-law calculated that “instead of treatment, the cost would be better to remarry a woman”. Her husband acquiesced, and only the woman’s mother remained at the bedside. The agony is also a particularly cruel aspect of ovarian cancer, the so-called “silent killer”.
Today, Zhang xiaoling’s QQ group for ovarian cancer patients is one of the few comforts for these women. “It’s good to have a place to talk. Several of us in our group of more than a hundred are getting married soon, and he got b0 because of the illness.”
Her own life, after 20 years of being “single” again. After sending her daughter to study abroad, she lived alone, ate alone, exercised alone and turned over and over her past life.
High recurrence rates remain a sword of Damocles over ovarian cancer patients, despite the uncertainty they face in the future.
During the long recovery process, Zhang has been trying to rebuild her life. After the operation, she once returned to work, but found that she was no longer competent for the hospital’s high-pressure clinical work, “unable to keep up with the speed of the department.” She took the initiative to move from a front-line position to a second-line position, and it took her a long time to adjust the psychological gap.
After a five-year survival period, Zhang Xiaoling had made three wishes for herself: one was to see her daughter go to college; Second, attend her daughter’s university graduation ceremony; Three is to see her daughter put on the wedding dress. In the early years, the woman who wants to be strong is busy fighting for the career, from the health school secondary school graduation and further study to junior college, undergraduate, up to now, she still clearly remembers that he had the confidence to make the “oath” to his daughter: “When you graduate from graduate school, I must graduate with you.”
Now that promise is hard to keep.
Although Zhang xiaoling often encourages everyone in the QQ group, everyone’s dilemma still needs to be faced by themselves. During the intermission of chemotherapy, Ye Ping has been staying at her home in zhenghe country. The bamboo hill facing her door is withered and sparse due to the arrival of winter, which is as barren as her state of mind at the moment.
When she saw her old father huddled in the corner of the house, she was tempted to cry: “He’s worked his whole life and I haven’t had time to repay him. If I were a strong woman, I wouldn’t get married. I want to earn my own money and live on my own.”
She hopes to stabilize her condition after six rounds of chemotherapy and find a job. “I’m still young and I still have so much to do,” she says.
(At the request of interviewees, Ye Ping and Zhang Xiaoling are pseudonyms.)
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