Tai Ji Men Qigong Academy

A Mother’s Tears

We had 9-day holidays during the Chinese New Year this year. Like the years before, the very day before the long holidays, the emergency room, outpatient clinic, and the operation rooms were always busy, while the hospital rooms were experiencing the least busy time of the year because most patients preferred to celebrate the holidays at home to the hospital. I had worked very hard that day, and I finally finished arranging for the patients to be discharged from the hospital and got myself ready for the holidays, but the emergency room just received a patient diagnosed with acute appendicitis. It looked like that I had to accompany this little girl in the hospital during the holidays.

Lying on the treatment bed was a 13-year-old girl. She looked small for her age, though she was healthy and strong. The girl’s mother stood by the side, worried and nervous while I did the examination on her daughter. The mother told me that her daughter was on her school’s swim team. For over 3 days, her daughter had been experiencing abdominal pains. This morning, her daughter still went to her swimming practice. In the afternoon, her coach found that the girl was in great pain and looked very pale, so he immediately contacted the mother to have the girl get treatment. After the examination, I thought it was very likely that the girl had acute appendicitis, so I recommended immediate surgery. After thinking for a few moments, the mother agreed to have her daughter undergo a surgery and signed the surgery agreement.

I still remember that twenty years ago my teacher told me that the appendectomy surgery is the basic surgical procedure that every surgeon needs to master and is the foundation of all surgery and that its principles can be applied to all fields of surgery. Therefore, I was very serious when learning how to perform this kind of operation. For the past 20 years, I had done the surgical procedure nearly a thousand times. I was proud of myself because even in tough cases where it was a challenging surgery for other surgeons, I was able to handle it smoothly. But this time, this little swimmer was giving me a hard time. I was beginning to lose my confidence.

I used the standard appendectomy procedure to get into her abdomen, and then carefully separated the tissues around the appendix; however, after two hours of hard work, I could not locate her appendix. It was because her appendix was in a special location that was different from that of other people. Besides, her appendix had been inflamed before, which caused severe adhesion of the surrounding tissues. This was my first time seeing this since I learned to perform appendectomy. I tried for another hour before I gave up. I invited the mother to the operating room and told her the details about the surgical procedure. I suggested that we should close up the cut, connect drainage tubes, and then treat it with an antibiotic injection.

Almost as soon as I finished my talk, tears started to run down the mother’s face. She kept apologizing for what had happened. She told me that her daughter had been complaining about abdominal pains for a month, but she did not believe her, and thought that she had been trying to find an excuse for not going to swimming practice. So she not only did not take her daughter to see the doctor, but kept forcing her to practice swimming. I felt great sympathy when I looked at the expression on the mother’s face and her tears of guilt. Suddenly, I thought of the teaching of my Shifu at Tai Ji Men Qigong Academy. My Shifu often reminds us, “When dealing with things, you need to have a calm heart and precise action.” Immediately, I settled down my mind and got back to the surgery. Within the next 10 minutes, I found the appendix and then removed it. On the morning of the New Year’s Day I went to visit the patient. I found that she had recovered well, so I let her mother bring her home to celebrate the New Year holidays. They were very happy about the results.

The mother’s tears inspired my empathy as a parent. However, I had been trying to locate the appendix for three hours but in vain and was finally able to find the appendix within 10 minutes after I calmed myself. I know clearly that the turning point was the moment when the teaching of my Shifu popped into my mind, which allowed me to keep a tranquil heart at the most critical moment, so we were able to have a happy ending.