Missions of mercy
Obstetrician and gynecologist Xu Changzhen has visited Algeria four times with medical-aid teams from 1993 to 2012, helping to save thousands of lives, Li Jing and Liu Kun report in Wuhan.
Xu Changzhen stood onstage in the auditorium of Jilin University in April. The room was overflowing with people. Decades after she graduated from the Norman Bethune University of Medical Sciences, now affiliated with Jilin University, she lectured the graduating students about her medical-aid work in Africa.
When Xu graduated from the university in Changchun, Jilin province, in 1975, she aspired to offer medical aid. She was influenced by the spirit of Norman Bethune. And she is now planting the seeds of service in another generation.
The students were very attentive, but one could hear the occasional sob and many rounds of applause.
“When I got to the aid mission for the first time in 1993, I felt excited,” she says.
But later she realized how naive she was when thinking about the difficulties.
Algeria was experiencing war, and the situation was grim. When the plane landed, the medical team was immediately sent to a hotel under heavy guard.
On the second night, Xu rushed to the operating room, where a patient was waiting for treatment. The pregnant woman was in severe hemorrhagic shock. Then, after emergency surgery, the baby stopped breathing and needed artificial respiration.
Without an aspirator, Xu had to suck out the water and secretions.
The baby, like many rescued by Chinese doctors, was named Chinois (Chinese in French).
With the protection of a police squad, the medical team stayed on, growing accustomed to war, gunfights and the wounded.
That is, until one day in 1994, when a fighter, disguised as a woman and clad in a white robe, approached the hospital.
As the country was mired in conflict, doctors often became the victims of kidnapping.
The fighter had come to kidnap the doctors. But when hospital personnel threw him on the floor, they found that he was also strapped with explosives and armed with a dagger.
The medical team was ordered to scatter and scrambled to safety. But Xu ran back suddenly because she had left behind a booklet given by an obstetrician when she first arrived in Algeria, which documented common diseases and the French translations of drug names.
As she exited the hospital once more, she saw a fallen patient.
With little regard for the danger of the situation, she dragged the patient back into the hospital and began treatment.
Duan Weiyu, the captain of the medical team, still remembers the scene clearly and mentioned it in an interview with a Hubei newspaper in 2013.
“I did not expect this mild, gentle doctor to be so brave,” Duan says.
After 14 months, the team was ordered to withdraw due to the deterioration of the situation.
But Xu was sorry to leave. “There were no doctors in local hospitals when we left. I had never seen patients who had such longing eyes as those there,” Xu says.
Her brush with death gave Xu a feel for the cruelty of the war, and some of her teammates have endured post-traumatic stress for years. But Xu did not say a word to her family. And when China resumed sending medical teams to Algeria in 2000, Xu applied again.
Xu was born into a doctor’s family in Changchun in 1952. She started her career as a doctor at a hospital in Huanggang, Hubei province.
When she went on her last mission, she was already retired. Xu celebrated her 60th birthday in Saida, a city in Algeria on the edge of the Sahara Desert, which was also where the first medical team dispatched to Africa by the Chinese government landed.
Though she was the oldest doctor in the hospital, Xu worked not only on night shift with the younger ones but also on the most difficult cases.
Once, a patient with HIV needed a C-section. The procedure was put off to the end of the day due to concerns over infection. Despite this, Xu, quietly came in to help, though she was not on duty.
Explaining why, she says: “There was no Algerian obstetrician in the operating room. The patient was very young, weak and pale. She was lying on the bed and longing for help.
“There was a Chinese obstetrician. But she was much younger than me. So, I felt it was better for me to do the job.”
The surgery went smoothly, but she found her clothes soaked through after it.
Doctors on medical missions in Africa, where HIV was then prevalent, used to undergo blood tests whenever they returned home.
Xu has visited Algeria four times on medical-aid missions.
She helped save thousands of lives during her more than seven years in Africa from 1993 to 2012.
“I spent the best part of my career in the African country,” Xu says. “But I missed the adolescence of my son and daughter.”
Xu’s daughter once complained to her that she had no one to share things with.
Now, the 67-year-old is the director of the obstetrics department at Wuhan Renai Hospital in the provincial capital. Her colleagues describe her as warm, professional and disarming.
Zhou Qunlian, an obstetrician at the hospital, says: “She is extremely considerate toward us young doctors. During operations, if she observes that our manual hemostasis, knots or stitches are not up to par, she will gently touch our hands, indicating that we should let her demonstrate.”
China has sent about 20,000 doctors to 51 countries and regions in Africa, where, together with local doctors, they have saved numerous lives since 1963.