(Approximately ten thousand words; about twenty minutes to read.)
To Chris & Bryan & Joyce
I woke up again in the small hours. The sleep-sustaining effects of lemborexant and estazolam both seemed to be weakening; I turned over a few times and knew that I would not sleep again that night. I had wanted to write something for a long time and had never begun, probably because some part of me understood that once I started I would have to live again through the things I did not want to dig up — the body remembers more than the mind. But lying there was lying there, so I got up to write.
This piece is for the past year. About what I went through in the ICU and the rehabilitation hospital, what I thought about during those nights I lay awake, and what remained after all of it.
Nine months. I wrote this in fragments over a long time, always at dawn, writing a passage when I woke, stopping when I could not go on, returning a few days later. There are places I still cannot write through. But I felt it should be written; the things that happened do not stop existing because you do not write them down.
The result first. The good news: the pathology came back the best possible result (WHO Grade I, by definition benign), and they had cut it clean; there would be no radiation after surgery. The bad news: I was left, more or less, with aftereffects.
I. Before surgery: it remembers
The past is never dead. It’s not even past. — Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun
Before the surgery I went to Sanya.
No particular purpose; I simply wanted to be somewhere with no one in it. Those days the wind and rain in Sanya suddenly worsened — the forecast said a passing tropical low, not likely to develop into a typhoon. I sat on the balcony watching the sky darken and hoped the next day’s flight would take off.
I like the sea. As a child I never had much chance to be close to it, and later I kept wanting to run toward the coast. Standing there, before you is water without edge, behind you your whole life. When you empty yourself and listen to the surf, let the faintly salt wind scrape across your face, or lie back on a beach chair with your eyes closed thinking of nothing — in those moments the restless mind can find a brief peace. But peace is always short; the moment the waves stop, the things inside your head come back.
It all began six years ago.
I had a thing called a brainstem glioma. The tumor sat on the dorsal side of the medulla in the brainstem; the pathology was pilocytic astrocytoma, WHO Grade I — benign, they said, but the place it grew was unreasonable; no doctor would call the brainstem a small matter. In the autumn of 2019 I had the first surgery. Afterward I had almost no sequelae; I rested two months and recovered completely. I thought it was over.
It was not over. Six years later, it came back.
I remember the afternoon they found the recurrence clearly. After reading the scans something buzzed in my head and the whole day went blank, the memories of six years ago rushing back at once, but this time I had a dim sense that it would not be so easy. Writing this now I think of something Kalanithi said — that after being close to one’s own death, nothing changes, and yet everything changes. When I first read it I thought it was affectation; only after living through it did I understand.
And the impact of the recurrence reached much further. Every deep contradiction hidden in one’s life, all those problems you had been avoiding, papering over in various ways, thinking time would smooth them out — no, they are always there, and they come to settle accounts with you all at once when you are at your weakest. The period before surgery was perhaps the most chaotic time of my life; the only person I could speak honestly to was a friend. I talked with him a few times, poured out to him what I could not say to anyone else (looking back, those words went to the one person in that time who was still willing to listen), and he did not offer much in the way of principles, only the occasional “hold on”; in the end he gave me a way of thinking that carried me through those hard days.
In Sanya I thought about many things. About the past, about myself, about the nature of suffering itself.
I attributed much of my past behavior to “greed” and “cowardice.” Later I saw that was wrong — cowardice, in the end, is only another form of greed: greed for safety, greed for the ease of escape, greed for the illusion of not having to face things. Go deeper and all greed comes from one source: the unwillingness to see the truth.
The unwillingness to see that everything is changing, that nothing can be held, that the so-called self is only a string of thoughts strung together. Then you grasp desperately — grasp at money, at relationships, at safety, at a promise that “it will get better” — the tighter you grip the more panicked, the more panicked the tighter, and the cycle turns. All suffering has its root in ignoring impermanence. To insist on finding something motionless in a river where everything flows — of course that hurts. It is not profound, but when you are inside it you cannot see; you cannot see not because you are stupid but because you do not want to. To see is to have to change; to change is to have to let go; to let go is to feel as if you have nothing. People fear “nothing.”
Thinking these things through does not make suffering disappear, but it changes — it loses its edge. You know you are dreaming a dream, and the terror inside the dream is still there, but you are no longer entirely drowned by it.
In those days in Sanya I made a list of things I wanted to live up to: to stay honest, to live transparently; to say fewer meaningless things; to enjoy what should be enjoyed, but not to use enjoyment as a tool to escape anxiety; to keep goodwill toward people and things; to remind myself each day to live in the present — neither chasing yesterday’s regrets nor rushing tomorrow’s fears.
I did not suddenly achieve all this. But at least I remembered. In the hardest days that followed, those words sat there — whether I could see them was another matter.
The same surgeon, the same hospital, and I vaguely remembered perhaps even the same operating room, OP Room 34 (I may be wrong; operating rooms all look alike). On September 1, 2025, I lay down on the operating table for the second time.
What does one think before going in? To tell the truth, nothing. More than fear there was calm and acceptance. What should truly be feared was what came after waking.
II. The ICU: they saw white; I saw grey
Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies. — The Shawshank Redemption
On the third day in the ICU the doctor finally came to pull the breathing tube. The moment it came out I thought I had made it through. I had not. After extubation I had violent throat spasms and my oxygen saturation dropped below eighty; I saw the doctor rush over and drape himself across me, pinching my throat, pushing air into my lungs with a balloon-like bag, one squeeze after another trying to pull the number back up, my throat twitching uncontrollably, urgent voices all around, I could not hear what they were saying, I could only feel someone pressing my chest and someone adjusting the machine; those seconds were very long. I knew the oxygen was falling, I knew they were working, and I could do nothing but lie there. Then they anesthetized me again and re-intubated.
When I woke I was back at the beginning, in a room alone. A nurse saw me open my eyes and came over: your pneumonia is quite serious, she said, don’t rush, rest a while longer.
“Rest a while longer” really meant the brainstem — the respiratory center sits right there, the surgical area pressed against it, and there was postoperative edema; the doctors dared not risk it again. One more incident would not mean re-intubation but a tracheostomy, a tube cut into the windpipe that might stay with me for a very long time.
I stayed in the ICU ten full days, mostly conscious. Consciousness — that is the cruelest part. The body could barely move; only the right side retained a trace of weak movement. My face was packed with mechanical-ventilation tubing and I could make no sound, my hands and feet tied to the bed to keep me from pulling the tubes in a confused state — I did not even have the right to struggle; they tied me because I might harm myself. I could not move, could not see clearly, could not speak; only the mind kept turning, the one thing still mine, though even that was almost no longer my own.
Someone told me afterward that the ICU is a bright place. In my memory the ICU was dim and grey — probably from the nystagmus, every color drained a layer: the white walls were grey, the lights were grey, even the nurses’ white coats were grey. When I was wheeled out on the tenth day the sunlight outside stabbed my eyes shut, and only then did I learn the world had color.
In those grey days the only brightness was those fifteen minutes. The ICU had a rule: odd-numbered beds on odd-numbered days could have family visit for fifteen minutes — fifteen minutes was the sole connection to the world outside; the other twenty-three hours and forty-five minutes you were on your own.
I counted the minutes every day for those fifteen minutes, just to see them briefly. But what were those fifteen minutes? I had nystagmus and could not see their faces clearly, my mouth was tubed and I could not speak, I could only listen with tears streaming (the double vision was so bad I could barely make out their expressions). A nurse brought a writing board and I managed with my right hand to scrawl a few crooked words, and they would lean close to read them. Fifteen minutes passed quickly. The nurses were kind and always quietly gave extra time; there were bed shifts because of other patients moving through, and the nurses helped with that — in the end I saw them almost every day.
Then they began sending letters in, and brought many photographs. One male nurse was especially kind and would hold the letter before me and read it word by word. Other nurses sometimes brought the photographs very close so I could barely make them out, and said encouraging things. Those words were all ordinary — “keep going,” “you’ll get better” — but in that place every sentence carried weight. Someone has said that when the scalpel has no place, words are the only instrument. Those nurses probably did not know they held an instrument, but they used it.
Only later did I learn that my family stood watch outside every day, morning to night. On the third day the nurses told them to give up the regular ward — no need to keep it; I would not be out soon. They still came early and left late, sitting outside the ICU door, unable to come in, unable to see me, just sitting. Every day.
After the failed extubation, during a visit, they told me they had spoken with the doctors: it would be about another week before they could try again. Hold on, they said.
I stopped counting the days. I prepared to stay a long time.
In the ICU my situation was called “bed-pressing” — something like a student held back. Others came in and transferred out in two or three days, but my bed could not be freed, new patients could not come in, and the nurses and doctors gave me a measure of extra care — though it was the kind of care you would rather not need.
After a few days I began to learn the nurses’ and doctors’ shift patterns, who took the day shift, who the night, which nurse was soft-hearted, which doctor spoke little. Because of the cerebral edema they used a good deal of medication, and the nurses discussed it during handover; I listened with ears perked and slowly understood a few words — “red prescription” meant psychiatric medication (probably powerful painkillers, I learned only today), “methylprednisolone” was for reducing swelling. I could not speak, but I heard everything. In a place where you could do nothing, listening became the only thing you could still do.
With the long intubation came ventilator-associated pneumonia. It stayed with me a long time; even after I left the ICU for the rehabilitation hospital it had not fully cleared.
The body was enduring; so was the mind. I could never sleep; day and night blurred together, and around the sixth or seventh day postoperative delirium set in, with heavy hallucinations.
The first time I woke from delirium I felt I had dreamed a very long dream, as long as a whole life. The dream was extraordinarily clear, not like a dream but like living another person’s life, and waking I was blurred about who I was; it took a long time to work out who I was, where I was, why I could not move. That feeling was worse than fear — fear at least means you still know who you are.
On my first night in the ICU I tried to pass the time counting breaths, planning to reach a hundred and start again. I found I could never reach twenty; the signal broke again and again — you are clearly counting and suddenly do not know what number, do not know what you were just thinking, then start over, and break again. By the sixth or seventh day I gave up counting altogether; the mind had begun to play films on its own and could not be stopped.
On the eighth day the doctors decided to try extubation again. I guessed that if it failed again it would be a tracheostomy.
When they pulled the tube the head nurse, the team of doctors, many nurses — perhaps a dozen people — stood around my bed; I knew they were more nervous than I was (only later did I learn my family were all waiting outside for the result). Professor Chen, the lead surgeon, came to pull it himself. The nurses stood ready. As the tube slid out I felt the throat spasm again — the same feeling as before. I threw everything I had into rolling onto my side, forced myself calm, and breathed — gently, slowly. One, two, three.
It seemed to hold.
The doctor was still uneasy and assigned a nurse to sit one-on-one beside me all day, watching the number on the oximeter, continuing heavy medication.
After the tube came out I discovered something else — I could not swallow and could barely make a sound. The saliva in my mouth would not go down; I could only turn my head and let it run out.
But breathing, at any rate, seemed fine. On the ninth day I thought I glimpsed hope. Yet somehow the extreme weakness brought a deeper fear — the body was improving, the mind was sinking. At night the delirium came back, worse than before, hallucinations scene after scene, unstoppable. The body gives you a little hope and the mind takes it away.
On the tenth day, finally, I was wheeled out of the ICU, back to a regular ward. My family came around and held me.
Looking back on those ten days: the ICU nurses worked three shifts a day, their task simple — to keep the patient’s vital signs stable, heart rate, oxygen, blood pressure, those numbers; once the numbers held, their job was done. Whether the person behind the numbers was conscious or collapsing, terrified or despairing, was not within their remit. It is not their fault; that is how the ICU runs. Still I want to say that in those ten days the nurses gave me care far beyond their duty — reading letters, showing photographs, extending visit time — things mostly not on their work list, but they did them. On those I made it through the ten hardest days and nights of my life.
III. The rehabilitation hospital: persistence was the only option
It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything. — Fight Club
In mid-November 2025 the feeding tube finally came out.
My nose was suddenly empty. For the first time in three months both sides were clear; a tube that had been in since the ICU was gone. Every meal had been pumped through it, one nostril blocked, washing my face around it, afraid of tugging it when I turned in sleep — now it was gone. Swallowing was still slow, drinking still made me cough, but at least I could “eat.” That afternoon and evening I was in a good mood; I felt I had taken a big step toward being normal.
Two months earlier, when I had first been transferred in, things worse than the tube were many.
I swayed even sitting.
My left arm could not move at all; I could hardly produce a voice; I could not see the screen of my phone clearly; bathing and using the toilet required help. The care worker cried quietly while bathing me and I pretended not to notice (thinking back it seems absurd, but in that state any small loss was enough to break a person — even “being seen without dignity” was itself a kind of breaking). When a person’s most basic dignity needs the body to bring it off, and the body will not, all stubbornness and pride are hollow.
In the first days after transfer I had to do examinations in various departments. I could not sit in a wheelchair; I could not hold myself up; the orderlies pushed the bed between buildings. I lay on it staring at the sky — so bright, so dizzying.
Only later did my family tell me that during surgery it had been very dangerous; my heartbeat dropped to twenty-something. They said that although there were sequelae I should treasure the outcome and push hard in rehab. I listened and nodded; I had no spare energy to think of anything else.
Then it began. Every day’s schedule was packed — physical therapy, occupational therapy, swallowing training, voice training, vision training, equipment training; at most twelve sessions in a day. Not because I was so strong, but because there was no other road.
Progress does not come because you try. Some days you walk steadily the day before, full of confidence, and the next day you sway and cannot stand straight; an impatient person is tormented by this swinging — two or three days without visible change and the anxiety rises, and anxiety makes you more tired, and tiredness makes things worse. Slowly I learned something: measured by the week, there was always progress. I had not realized any truth; my body taught me — it knows when to stop and when to go; all you need to do is not interfere.
Then there was eating.
Nearly two months after surgery: avocado, banana, yogurt, pureed in a blender — to call it “eating” was closer to “swallowing.” It took twenty full minutes, but it was the first thing with flavor since August. Later there was cake — a cream square, a whole piece; I felt stuffed afterward, but it was the rich contentment of being stuffed. Later there were wontons, minced rice. I wrote myself a menu: hot sliced boiled mutton, hairy crab, white-cut chicken, cake, pudding, sesame paste. That is how it is — when you cannot eat you would settle for licking a lollipop; once you can eat a little you start wanting variety, and once you have variety you crave something else. In those days, when my eyes could finally focus on the phone, I would order food on the grocery app for my mother, who stayed with me — always things I wanted to eat, which I could only look at.
But the body’s improvement and the state of the heart are two different things. Looking back, Ferrante was exactly right — the best moments are always intertwined with the worst.
Swallowing was recovering, walking farther, strength returning, but what was inside did not come back with it. Chronic sleep deprivation, anxiety layer on layer, worst upon waking — all the negative emotions pressed heavy on the chest, loosening only when sessions began and attention was taken up, a little better by evening, sinking again at night. Day after day.
One night I cried for a long time, wanted to scream — but the vocal cords could barely work then, I could not scream — wanted someone to look at me and tell me not to be afraid. That helplessness — perhaps in the ICU it was no worse.
One night a thought even came: compared with this feeling of being hollowed out little by little, the physical torment of the ICU might be acceptable. Life was already shattered like this; I only wanted to put it together, to experience a little more of the beauty of being alive — why was it so hard.
(Only later did I realize that in those days the mind was far more dangerous than the body. The body had therapists watching, indicators to quantify — how many steps, how many swallows, clear and measurable. The wounds of the mind have no scale, no one scores them, you cannot say whether you are better, only “probably,” and then at three in the morning you wake and find that you are not.)
And so it went until mid-November, when the feeding tube came out.
From unable to sit to walking independently, from unable to swallow saliva to three soft meals a day — two months. What happened in between — daily high-intensity training of the body, the反复 anxiety and low spirits, and something deeper, a longing for ordinary life that sometimes pulled you forward and sometimes strangled you — you could not tell whether it was motive force or instrument of torture. But it was moving forward.
The doctors and therapists here helped me greatly. The rehabilitation physician led, coordinating ST speech therapy, PT physical therapy, OT occupational therapy, with ophthalmology and psychiatry, plus the nurses’ daily care — multidisciplinary, fitted together. For someone who had injured brain, eyes, throat, limbs, and mood all at once, this coordination was not ornament but necessity.
On the day of discharge I set myself a goal: by Lunar New Year, back to basic self-care.
IV. Going home: what remained and what came back
A person lives for the sake of living itself, and not for anything beyond living. — Yu Hua, To Live
At the end of November 2025 I was discharged and went home.
I walked into the room and cried, my nose burning — partly that I had made it back, partly that I had dragged so many people down. The living room was piled with unopened boxes — an elliptical machine, a comprehensive trainer, bottles and jars brought back from the hospital. My father had just turned on the air conditioner and the power tripped; my mother stood in the kitchen mid-cooking not knowing what to do; I sat on the sofa afraid to move, wanting to help and unable, could not even stand and walk two steps, could only sit, watching. That day I badly wanted a room of my own — not that I did not have one, but I wanted a room where I could close the door and need no one’s help; the four-person ward at the rehab hospital had been freer than this.
(Years later I will probably remember this day — not the emotion, but how concrete the powerlessness was, so concrete I could smell the new rubber mat, could hear the click of the breaker when the power tripped.)
The bedroom was on the third floor. Every day after coming home I went up and down at least once, gripping the railing, step by step. Later I counted: dozens of steps from the first to the third floor, and every one of them I had climbed in a different version — some versions with trembling legs, some versions needing to stop to breathe, some versions without holding the rail, some versions even carrying something. By December the stairs were no longer a problem. But I still remember the beginning, how on every step up I did not dare look down — because going back was not a matter of a few steps, it was handing yourself back over again.
Mornings I practiced at home; afternoons I slung on a backpack and went to the hospital for outpatient rehab. The moment I put on the pack I felt it — the weight of the bag on my right shoulder (my left shoulder still has no sense of pressure), my two feet on the ground, the body seemed to be mine again. “Commute” — I used this word for a long time; in fact it was a twenty-minute drive, but the very process of going out with the bag and coming back with it turned the body into a thing one could command. It was then, on some day I cannot name, that you stopped feeling like a patient. Still in rehab, still going to the hospital, but the way you went was no different from an office worker going to the office — bag on, out the door, back. A patient is cared for; you had begun to care for yourself. No one tells you about this shift, there is no ceremony, you simply notice it one day walking with your bag on the street.
December 9 — the hundredth day after surgery, the day of the first MRI follow-up.
I walked slowly from the parking lot to the ward, dizzy, swaying; people beside me probably thought I was a drunk young man. Few then knew what I had been through, and they did not need to. I went into the MRI machine — the same sound, hum hum hum hum; the last time I had heard it was before surgery confirming the plan; six years ago, before the first surgery, the same sound — the sound the same, the person inside it no longer.
The result: cut clean; no radiation needed, no chemotherapy needed.
I sat in the hospital corridor; I did not cry or laugh, I simply sat, for a long time. Good news also needs to be digested; you have carried bad news so long the body does not know how to receive good, the hands trembling — not the trembling of fear but a surplus energy with nowhere to go. Looking back on that scene now, what surfaces is the last line of The Remains of the Day — “my remaining years.” When I first read it I thought it meant a day; now I know it means a lifetime.
After coming home the days stretched. When I had worked, a day flew; now an afternoon could hold steaming a fish, washing a few bowls, sitting on the balcony watching the light go down, the darkening a visible process.
One day walking along my feet quickened — not planned, the body deciding before the mind. I ran a short distance. The form must have been ugly, but the feeling of both feet leaving the ground — it had been a long time.
I began to cook. One dish a day, as an extension of occupational therapy. The first was probably steamed fish — little prep, good flavor. Later I made braised yellow croaker, Sichuan tofu pudding, ribs stewed with potatoes; the recipe list grew longer and the refrigerator fuller. Cooking is interesting — it requires hand, eye, taste, and rhythm all online at once, with immediate feedback: good or not, you know at once. One day cutting a potato I suddenly thought of that avocado-banana puree at the rehab hospital, twenty minutes to swallow — and now standing in my own kitchen, knife in hand, cutting however large I wanted.
I played games for a long time. Once the SteamDeck arrived I played every day; the controller happened to train my left hand, and gaming became legitimate — not goofing off, but rehab. The finger dexterity, button pressure, precise positioning of the left hand once taken for granted all had to be learned again. But the good thing about games is you can die a hundred times and it does not matter; just start over — unlike real life.
On the 22nd, my birthday, I bought a cake, blew out candles, played a hand of mahjong.
Very ordinary things. A few months before, each had been fantasy.
Before New Year, on a whim, I took the family to Suzhou and Wenzhou. No plan — one day I felt I could go out, and we went. The streets of Suzhou, the seafood of Wenzhou; some of the things on that rehab-hospital menu I had listed for months were finally within reach. Where exactly we went did not matter; what mattered was walking in a strange place without panic — before this, home to hospital had been the whole world, that road walked two months, every paving stone familiar. Suddenly one day I found I did not need to walk only that road.
But the days after coming home were not without low points.
Waking at two or three in the morning was common; occasionally a deep fear of death would surge up — probably the aftereffect of having been infinitely close; when it does not come you think you are better, and when it comes you realize — not. Sometimes I would fall into a low I could not name, feeling everything was of no weight, that all things would scatter with the wind. Once, turning over at one in the morning, I found the left side of my body nearly immobile, dazed for a few seconds not knowing where I was, what time, whether these days were real or a very long dream, and when I came to I thought: if only I could wake on some afternoon, head on a desk, drooling, my desk-mate laughing at me — how good that would be.
(At one’s most fragile one probably returns to the earliest place. Those images come of themselves, not out of nostalgia, but because that body had not yet known suffering.)
But on the whole, life was coming back little by little. Like spring — it is not that one day it suddenly warms; it is that looking back, you find winter has passed.
V. Now: approaching the ordinary
The tricky part of illness is that, as you go through it, your values are constantly changing. — Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air
It rained the other day and I slipped, fell hard on my backside, my lower back aching for days. Nine months on, I am still unbalanced, but I got right back up, which shows the body is still improving.
These days my life is roughly this: up in the morning to exercise; in good weather I run in the park — three kilometers at most — ride a bicycle, twenty-five kilometers on the outer-ring greenway; cook for myself — steamed fish, pan-seared steak, stir-fried vegetables, the recipe list far longer than the one at the rehab hospital (that list was all purees); in the afternoon study, handle some work; in the evening play games, watch a show, or take a walk. At the time of discharge, running, cycling, cooking — none were possible. Now they are done.
My vocal cord is still paralyzed, the voice hoarse; on the phone people often cannot hear me, they hang up and I call back in a breathy whisper. But there is a surgical option; when the time comes I will have it repaired. With my left hand, if I close my eyes and pick something up, I often cannot feel the thing in my hand. The temperature and pain sensation in my right arm and trunk has not returned; once cooking I burned myself and did not know; I joke that I am now a “heartless iron hand,” who can even stir-fry with bare skin. Some things come back slowly, some may never come back; this line will not cease to exist because you do not accept it, but on the whole the direction is toward the good.
My most recent MRI follow-up was stable, no new abnormalities. Next check in six months; wait for the next time.
For a while I was very anxious. In the small hours I would flip through pathology classifications of glioma, recurrence rates, five-year survival rates, targeted-drug trials, the latest on tumor-treating fields — one after another, the more I read the more alarmed, the more alarmed the more I felt I must read one more, as if one more data point gave one more bit of control. The doctors had made the best arrangement; the strategy was sound, but the mind would not stop. Late one night I talked with Gemini for a long time; it said to let go of excessive prediction of the future and put energy into what is in front of me. The very thing I had worked out in Sanya, half a year later an AI had to say again before I truly stopped. Between knowing and doing there sometimes lie many sleepless dawns.
After that fall I was low; I wanted to record something and felt there was no point. I remembered that during the first illness I had constantly thought of leaving something for the people I loved — wrote long letters, recorded videos, as if preparing a dignified farewell. This time it was different — beside whomever, there is no truth that they cannot live without me; in fact it is only that I cannot bear to let go.
Sometimes I still fall into that nameless low, feeling everything of no weight, all things scattering with the wind. When it does not come the days pass fine; when it comes you know they never did.
But the days go on. It has grown warm; the sun is good; outside, cycling or running, I feel the whole person recharged. The other day running by the river, my headphones randomly played Pu Shu’s “Born Like Summer Flowers” — “I do not know how long I slept in the dark, nor how hard it is to open my eyes; I came from far away and by chance you were here too, lingering madly in this world.” As I listened my steps slowed — not tired, but suddenly every word made sense. Cooking becomes more and more natural; the kitchen is no longer a rehab room, just an ordinary person’s kitchen. Work is slowly coming back — learning AI, handling things; the company has supported my recovery all along.
Having written all this, what I most want to say comes down to a few lines.
“Living” is not an abstract word. A single breath, a sip of water, a single step, a syllable, a whole night’s unbroken sleep — never before did I think these things needed to be thanked.
Knowing this, even depressed and afraid, one feels a little better. For the smallest hope, one must try with all one’s might.
To live ordinary days is a kind of luxury.
Now, it seems, I am slowly approaching that ordinariness.
And this ordinariness is not something one person could have reached alone.
This piece mentions some people; there are more it does not.
Professor Chen, the surgeon — both surgeries were his. The second was very difficult; he and his team balanced prognosis and sequelae, and I trust and am grateful to them fully. Dr. Zou is my friend; before and after surgery he answered my questions and eased the doubts in my mind. The nurses in the ICU read letters to me, showed me photographs, extended visit time — none of it on their work list, but they did it. The doctors and therapists at the rehabilitation hospital — their multidisciplinary coordination was not optional; for someone covered in wounds, each department held up a different piece.
My family — from the ICU to the rehab hospital to coming home, not one day absent. Those ten days in the ICU they stood watch outside from morning to night, unable to come in, unable to see me, just sitting at the door. Then at the rehab hospital, two whole months, sleeping on the fold-out sofa. Caring for me, all while enduring my bad temper.
Joyce — in the ICU I could not see you clearly, but I felt you there all along. Later, during recovery, I imagined so many things we would do together once I was well — now, one by one, they are slowly coming true.
My friends. The friend who listened before surgery, written of here. During the ICU, friends helped make connections, ran errands outside for me — things I, lying inside, could not do; someone did them. Friends came to see me at the hardest time, sat beside the bed and spoke to me at length; I could not speak conveniently and there was little exchange, but I knew their care. Several colleagues, and my boss-friend, held the work side from hospitalization through rehab to home; another helped greatly during the most dangerous stretch in the ICU; some help cannot be contained in the word “help.”
The children probably do not entirely understand what happened. Each time I see them eating with heads down, finding topics to brag to me about, sighing over their math scores, telling school stories — these images matter more than any words. It occurs to me that the other day I gave them two math workbooks as “gifts.”
Living has never been only one’s own affair, but thinking is a very private thing. This piece is also written for myself.
Nine months after surgery, late May 2026