| A Sunnier Life | ||||||||||||||
| Text and paintings by Chen Yu-yu Translated by Tang Yau-yang | ||||||||||||||
Chen Yu-yu (陳宇昱), born in 1967, is a cancer patient who also suffered a spinal injury in a traffic accident that left him seriously disabled. Fighting these two serious medical conditions, he managed to regain enough use of his hands to write and paint and live a fuller life. In November 2014, his writings and paintings were collected and published in a Chinese book, A Sunnier Life, which we have condensed into the following article. From these excerpts and the accompanying artwork, the reader may get a glimpse of the adversity, despair, love of family and friends, hope, and joy that Chen has experienced in his rollercoaster ride of a life, and how after all his hardship he is still able to face every day with a heart of gratitude.
ON JUNE 7, 2003, A SATURDAY, I drove my family to Hualien for a funeral and drove back home late that night to Taoyuan. With little rest, I went to work on Sunday as usual. [As a cook, the author worked in shifts]. After making enough lunches to feed 4,000 people, I got off work exhausted and rode my scooter home, longing for some soothing shuteye. But instead of arriving at home, I ended up in an ICU. When I regained consciousness three days later, I found that there were tubes in my mouth and nose and IV drips in both of my arms. I tried to move my butt, but my body refused to respond. I passed out again soon after, but not before realizing that things looked pretty ugly.
It was unclear what had happened. Was I trying to avoid a pothole or was I hit by a car that caused me to fall off my scooter and land on the side of the road? Whatever had happened, a passerby had seen me lying there, reported the accident to the police, and had me rushed to the hospital. The thing that mattered the most was very clear, though. I was wearing a whole-head helmet at the time of the accident. When I fell, the force of the collision pushed the edge of my helmet violently against my neck and caused the discs between my fourth and seventh cervical vertebrae to slip. They were severely damaged. As a result, I was paralyzed from the chest down and had little grip strength left in my hands. “He’s severely injured,” my attending physician told my family. “Even if we can save him, he’ll probably end up in a vegetative state. I recommend that you take him home.” The doctor probably thought I was too sick to hear him, but I was conscious and heard every word. “Please do everything possible to save my brother,” pleaded Xun-hui (迅暉), my younger brother. “He’s only 36, and he’s got two small children to raise.” The doctor said nothing in reply. I clung to life by a thin thread in the neurological surgical ICU, thanks to a respiratory machine and other life-support equipment. I lay there, unable to move. Due to the constant bright light in the unit, I wouldn’t even have been able to tell day from night if my family hadn’t visited me every day. They were allowed to visit me twice a day, for 20 minutes each time. Their visits let me know that I’d survived another day. I stayed in that ICU for ten days.
THE FIRST SIX MONTHS AFTER MY INJURY were critical to my survival. After I was moved out of the ICU into a regular ward, Xun-hui and A-jin (阿錦), my wife, hired a professional caregiver for me. The cost was 2,200 Taiwanese dollars (US$73) a day, or about 2,200 American dollars a month. Mom had wanted to personally take care of me so that we wouldn ’t have to fork out such large sums. She had tried to do it for a short while after I was moved into the regular ward, but she soon had to turn that work over to a professional. On my first day in the regular ward, my lungs were severely infected and mucus was pervasive in my respiratory tract. I needed to cough forcefully to expel the phlegm. The problem was that I couldn’t even breathe smoothly, let alone cough with enough force to clear my lungs. As a result, I needed external help to get the mucus out. I needed someone to push on my abdomen up towards my diaphragm in rhythm with my weakened coughing. This outside help, or “mucus pushing,” would make it possible to evacuate large lumps of phlegm. I still remember that on that first day I suddenly had difficulty breathing. “Whish, whish….” I struggled and gasped for air before I passed out. Horrified, Mom yelled for help. A nurse hurried over to my side and revived me. She said to my mom, “Mrs. Chen, you need to do ‘mucus pushing’ for him.” She demonstrated how to do it. “Now cough—one, two, three,” she told me. As I followed her orders, her palms pushed my abdomen up. My exertions, however weak, were magnified by her force. Together, we managed to get lots of mucus out. I felt much better. When I needed to vacate mucus again, Mom tried to mimic the nurse and help me push it out. Her strong hands delivered plenty of force, but she pushed down into my stomach instead of up toward my diaphragm. Rather than pushing out mucus, she hurt me like crazy. “Please, Mom! You’re breaking my bones!” I moaned. After some chaotic maneuvering and painful moments, we did get some mucus out, but I was exhausted. Mom was sweaty from all the exertion too. There were many other things that I needed help with besides mucus pushing: urinating, bathing, rehab, and extraction of feces. The last of these items was a big deal that took a helper and me at least four hours to accomplish. My wife might have been able to do those things for me, but she had to take care of our kids and run our household, so we had to count her out. Mom realized that taking care of me would not be so easy, so she finally consented to hire a professional caregiver for me. Seven such helpers have cared for me since.
SINCE I WAS PARALYZED FROM THE CHEST DOWN, even easy movements like rolling over in bed, sitting up, and crawling were difficult for me. I had to start like a baby, learning everything as if for the first time. I had to undergo a great deal of rehabilitation. Often, overly anxious for progress, I would push my body too hard. I ended up scraping my skin and aching all over. I needed massage and pain-relieving ointment every night. At the suggestion of a therapist, Mom made elbow guards out of bicycle tire inner tubes for me. They helped prevent blisters and they added traction and propulsion for easier crawling. I was making a slow recovery, but my will to survive was severely challenged by persistent pain. I always felt numb, prickly and tight; these stubborn symptoms of neuralgia just would not go away. I tried all sorts of medications and all forms of physical therapy, acupuncture, and electrotherapy, but nothing relieved my pain. When I asked the doctors for help, they always urged me to hang in there and put up with it. I felt living like that was worse than dying. I was thoroughly discouraged and depressed. I lost interest in eating and my weight dropped drastically.
One day while I was staring idly at the ceiling in my hospital room, Mom put down the knitting that she was doing and came to my bedside. She gave me two solid slaps on my face and sobbed, “It’s time you woke up. No amount of self-pitying will change the facts about the accident. It really hurts me to see you like this. See how much weight you’ve lost!” Mom then buried her face on my chest and cried her heart out, venting her pent-up emotions. Afterwards, she wiped away her tears and said, “We’ ll never give up on you as long as you live. Please do your best at physical therapy. Live for yourself, for your wife, and for your children.” I gradually adjusted to a life constrained by my badly paralyzed shell. On top of my obvious physical disabilities, my cardiopulmonary functions had also deteriorated. My body retained only a weakened ability to regulate my heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, perspiration, body temperature, bowel movements, and urination. If I sat up, my blood pressure would fall and I would pass out, but when my bladder was full my blood pressure would suddenly spike. I often had spasms, and the risk of pressure sores developed. All that may sound horrible, and it was. But it paled in comparison to the pain from the neuralgia. This stubborn pain topped the list of my troubles by a wide margin. It never failed to torture me several times a day. When the pain hit, it felt like a knife had gashed the skin over my spinal column. Then it would seem like the wound was pulled back to either side of the spine to expose more of the flesh inside, and salt was sprinkled on the raw flesh. The pain was horrendous and penetrated everywhere. Even today, I am seized with fright and my pulse quickens every time I think back on those days when I was tortured by so much pain.
ACTUALLY, PAIN WAS NOTHING NEW TO ME. Just a year before the traffic accident, I was diagnosed with oral cancer. I had only myself to blame for getting the disease: I used to chew betel nuts. I started chewing betel nuts [a common habit in Taiwan] when I was a teenager. Mom tried to talk me out of that bad habit, one that had been proven to cause oral cancer. She even offered me a large sum of money, every penny of which she had saved from running a soybean pudding stand, to get me to quit chewing. “What is money?” I said frivolously in response to her offer. “You can earn it easily enough, but the happiness chewing betel nuts gives me is beyond anything money can buy. ” So I stayed with my addiction, and ended up getting cancer. For my treatment, doctors determined the best course of action was to remove a large area in my mouth that had been overrun by cancer, and then transplant a skin graft from my buttock into my mouth to cover up the wound. Before the surgery, I took a good look at my own face. Never before had I looked at it so carefully—I had thick eyebrows, large eyes, and a high, straight nose. It was a nice-looking face. Before the operation, a nurse asked me, “Do you have anything to say to the surgeon?” “I beg him to please keep as much of my looks as possible.” I was terrified of what I might look like after the surgery, and I regretted my self-indulgence and reckless imprudence. As promised, the surgeon took out the affected part. But it didn’t heal well afterwards. The skin graft was rejected, and my face became red and swollen, like a ripe persimmon. Later, the doctor extracted 11 healthy teeth on my left side. He said he did that for fear that I’d be unable to clean my teeth well if the fibrosis of tissues in my mouth got worse in the future. If I had known better, I would never have touched betel nuts.
THE DOCTORS WERE AT THEIR WITS’ END about how to treat my neuralgia. The frequent change of medications to relieve my pain only led to depression. On September 2, 2005, a little over two years after my spinal injury, I couldn’t take it anymore and decided to commit suicide. Late that night, while all was quiet and my caregiver was sleeping, I took out a knife and tried to slit my wrist. However, instead of cutting a deep gash in my wrist, the attempt left but a pitiful line with only a little blood oozing out. My hand couldn’t even grip the knife firmly enough to do the job. I knew that I wasn’t going to end it all that way. Then I tried stabbing the knife into my chest. After a few dozen attempts, blood began seeping from my chest. With my strong resolve to die, I fixed the knife the best I could and threw my full weight on it. Finally, I heard a ka-cha sound, and blood began flowing out in earnest. I closed my eyes. All my pain would finally end now…. In a trance, I dreamed of going out on an excursion with my dad, who had passed away years before. My mom, sister, and brother were also in the dream. They had all reached the top of a slope on their bikes, with me lagging far behind. I waved my hand like crazy and cried out, “ Dad! Mom! Wait for me!” But none of them heard me. I pedaled the best I could, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t catch up. With tears and sweat running down my face, I saw them disappearing in the distance. I jolted awake from my trance. I could feel my blood pressure falling rapidly due to loss of blood. I called out loud to wake my caregiver. She called the nurse, and people ran in to save me. My family rushed to the hospital. Seeing tears streaming down my brother’s face, I was too ashamed to say anything. “Doctor, should we give him another X-ray?” Mom asked the doctor. “Is he really okay? Are you sure his intestines weren’t damaged?” Gripped by deep remorse, I apologized to my mom, my wife, and my brother.
JUST BEFORE CHINESE NEW YEAR in 2007, I heard about a case in which doctors at Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital had used an implanted microchip to relieve pain for a spinal-injury patient. The news gave me a glimmer of hope. If the pain I suffered could be eased, the quality of my life would improve tremendously. I was admitted into the Hualien hospital on March 1, 2007. The medical team decided that an implanted “pain pump” in the spinal canal would be the best choice for me. This extremely precise device would be capable of releasing pain medicine in fractions of a milliliter (0.03381 fluid ounce) a day. Even when the amounts of medicine I received were about one hundredth of what I took orally, it would be more effective in relieving pain. It all sounded great to me, so I was put through tests to evaluate how well I would respond to this device. I responded well, and the pump was implanted on March 22. I had to thank my older sister, Wan-xin (婉昕), and her husband for paying my medical bills, which came to 760,000 Taiwanese dollars (US$25,000). Growing up, my sister, brother, and I had been very close. After my accident, they went all out to help me. I was confined to bed for a week after the surgery, and during that time I was already sleeping better. Before the implant, I would take two sleeping pills before I went to sleep at night. Even so, pain still woke me about every three hours, and I had to take more sleeping pills to fall asleep again. But on the last night of the bed confinement, I awoke only once to empty my bladder with a catheter and to turn over. Then I slept through the rest of the night and well into the morning. Ah, that was so very refreshing and invigorating!
With my pain easing, I stopped pitying myself and I felt that my life was looking up. Eventually, I was transferred to the rehabilitation department to undergo vocational and physical therapy. Invited by nurse Yu Jia-lun (余佳 倫), I visited other spinal-injury patients to cheer them up. When Master Cheng Yen came to visit patients in the hospital during my hospitalization, she encouraged me to carry on bravely and to make the best use of my life. I decided that I would become the Master ’s disciple and join Tzu Chi. After three months of treatment at the hospital, my pain was effectively under control. Before I was discharged, I signed a consent form to donate my body for medical research after I die.
WITH THE IMPLANTED PUMP WORKING GREAT FOR ME, I felt like I’d been reborn. Step by step, I walked out of the valley of darkness. One day in July, Mom drove me to a flower market. On the way we passed a Tzu Chi Jing Si Hall [a Tzu Chi activity center]. We stopped and visited. My eyes were attracted to a poster put up at the entrance advertising some continuing education classes. I took a close look to see if there was any class I could take. Then we went to a painting exhibition on the second floor. I was mesmerized by the paintings showcased there. “You once wanted to go to a vocational school and study art, but we couldn’t afford it,” Mom said. “Since you like painting, why don’t we sign you up for the painting class offered here?” So, just like that, I started taking an art course called “Plain Art” in September 2007. “It’s not important whether your painting resembles your subject,” said the teacher, Zhang Jun-xiang (張鈞翔), in our first class. “But it ’s of utmost importance to have fun and feel confident in drawing.” He said he wouldn ’t teach us how to paint. The purpose of the class was to draw as we wished, in whatever way we liked, and to express ourselves happily through art. Students would share their artwork in class, learn from each other, and gradually develop their own unique style.
Mr. Zhang asked us to paint at home on any topic that we pleased, and each student was to come to the next class with at least one painting to show and share. Because I couldn’t sit too long at any one time and because my fingers sometimes twitched uncontrollably, I finished my first painting over the course of many separate sessions. It took me a week to get it done, but I was profoundly grateful and happy because I was fulfilling a dream of my youth. I enjoyed the class tremendously. The teacher did a great job of inspiring our interest, enthusiasm, and potential in painting. In the 15-session class, Zhang led us from being total novices to painters with at least 20 drawings. I made surprising headway, both physically and spiritually, through each class. I could feel my strength returning, and I was able to sit longer. I used drawing to improve my dexterity and grip. I poured my feelings and emotions into my paintings, behind each of which was a story. I felt spiritually enriched and cheerful. I was having all the joy of painting while also being physically rehabilitated. After that class, I signed up for more classes, including watercolor, ink painting, and oil painting. I even signed up for a singing class. Encouraged by Tzu Chi Sister Zhuang Min-fang (莊敏芳), I also began training to become a Tzu Chi documenting volunteer to record inspiring life stories and to cheer up dispirited souls. My life became very busy and fulfilling.
EVEN THOUGH MY LIFE REGAINED ITS VIBRANCY thanks to the painting class, I continued to need medical care. Once while painting works for an exhibit, I often sat too long at a stretch without taking a break. I was well aware that such reckless behavior could result in pressure sores, but I was more anxious to put on a good show. I kept telling myself to hang in there. When a pressure sore did develop, I figured it could wait. I decided to finish my works first and treat the sore later. As I painted, my sore got worse. I implored my caregiver not to tell my family about my condition. Eventually I did go to see the doctor a couple of times, but I kept up my work pace just the same. At last I finished my works before the exhibit, but I also had to suffer the consequences of my recklessness. On June 19, 2009, I had a high fever and felt extremely weak, so I was rushed to the emergency room. The medical team did all they could for me. I survived, but not without an egg-sized sore on my bottom. I checked into Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital under the care of Dr. Lu Chun-de (盧純德), head of plastic surgery. At first I didn’t respond well to his treatment, but he assured me he was giving me his best care and asked me to trust him. “This is just a sore. Together, you and I will fix it. Don’t worry.” My brother had provided for my family since my injury, and my wife, besides running our household, worked at a breakfast shop for a small income. Given my limited finances, the nurses promised to help us save on treatment expenses. Dr. Lu operated on me numerous times. Two months into the treatment, I discovered a small lump on my throat. An ENT doctor did a biopsy and confirmed that my cancer had recurred. Dr. Lu comforted me and told me not to be discouraged. He said he and the ENT doctor would work together to care for me. That lump was later surgically removed. Eventually, Dr. Lu successfully helped me grow enough flesh to fill the cavity of the horrible sore. It took 15 operations. He then took a piece of skin from my head and transplanted it to my butt. One reason for choosing my head to provide skin was that the wound where the skin had been taken would be basically invisible when my hair grew back. But to reap that benefit, I had to pay a very painful price. Fortunately, it was a one-time and temporary pain. My head hurt badly after the grafting surgery. When I was returned to my room, despite the pain medicine, I could not stand it anymore. I howled out loud—something that I had never done through all my prior surgeries. Blessedly, I returned home with that sore repaired. I deeply appreciated Dr. Lu’s efforts. I can never thank him enough.
WHEN ZHANG, WHO CONDUCTED THE PLAIN ART CLASS, learned of my desire to hold a solo exhibition, he picked 41 of my works and, with the aid of other Tzu Chi volunteers, staged an exhibit for me at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital in March 2011. More exhibits of my works were held later at other Tzu Chi hospitals and Tzu Chi branch offices around Taiwan. The 14-exhibit tour concluded after two years and seven months. People who came to the exhibitions gave me very encouraging feedback. I was once a seriously disabled man who didn’t know how to carry on with his life, but I rediscovered confidence, hope, and a sense of purpose through painting. Over the years, while fighting my own physical battles, I have often shared my experiences with people whose lives have been turned upside down by illness. I hope that I have helped them pick themselves up and go on living the best they can. At the same time, I have benefitted from Mom’s care during all these years. She’s become quite an expert in caring for me, a far cry from that person who didn’t know how to get the offending mucus out of my chest and who panicked when I passed out because I couldn’t breathe. Things have gotten better for me, but my health has been far from excellent. It has often gotten worse. Several times, too many times, this was because of my oral cancer—the consequence of my one-time bad habit of chewing betel nuts. In 12 years, the cancer has recurred five times. I’ve even had to have half my tongue removed. But it’s too late to regret. Since the accident, many people have helped me, too many to list them all here. I am grateful to them beyond words. My family has supported me with unconditional love, money and time. Doctors and nurses have done their best to treat me. Tzu Chi volunteers have given me a lot of care. Master Cheng Yen’s teachings have given me great strength to face the hardships thrown in my way. Wanting to give back to society, I’ve completed training and become a certified Tzu Chi volunteer. Years of illness and countless treatments have left me feeble, and I feel like a lamp with the flame flickering in the wind, but I’ll carry on bravely and continue to emit what little light I have. |
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