China Daily Global Edition (USA)
Pressure points
Devoted surgeon has his heart set on helping others despite the hardships and the misunderstanding of the patients he is trying to help
A devoted surgeon has his heart set on helping others.
When talking about his more than 20 years working as a coronary artery and carotid artery surgeon, Liu Peng, 55, said that he felt sorry for his family as he seldom has any time to be with them due to his schedule of five or six operations a day.
However, he says the reward is the satisfaction he gets from the thanks of his patients.
“I feel my efforts are worthwhile every time one of my patients expresses gratitude to me,” said Liu Peng, who is now the director of cardiovascular surgery at Beijing’s Sino-Japanese Friendship Hospital and vice-dean of the cardiovascular surgery department of the Medical School of Peking University.
“Once I stand at the operating table, I put everything out of my mind. Completing the operation successfully becomes the only concern for me,” he said.
The more difficult an operation is, the more he sees it as a challenge. For patients who have problems with their coronary arteries and carotid arteries at the same time, Liu tries to perform the two operations at a single sitting, which can reduce the risks of heart failure.
But this is both technically and physically demanding. It took him five hours to successfully do both during a single operation on a patient in 2014, and he has done such double operations together on more than 70 patients since.
He is known throughout the hospital as an “iron man”. Back in 2003 when Beijing was struck by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, the Sino-Japanese Friendship Hospital was designated as special medical facility for receiving SARS patients and Liu was appointed director of the Intensive Care Unit. He worked there for three months without having a day off. While he was not infected by the virus, several of his colleagues were not so lucky and they are still suffering from the sequelae after they were infected at that time.
Having studied cardiovascular operations in Japan and carotid artery operations in the United States, Liu said that the workload of Chinese surgeons is about 10 or even 20 times that of their foreign counterparts, but they are paid much less. That is a fact of life for Chinese surgeons. The great number of patients they treat provides Chinese doctors, those in big hospitals in particular, with more than enough opportunities to accumulate clinical experience, but China is not the right place for doctors wanting to make a lot of money, Liu said.
As far as the relationship between doctors and patients is concerned, Liu said that thorough communication is a necessity between the two parties. He did not complain about his patients, but he talked about a dispute he was involved in.
It happened five years ago, when he had a patient who was
You just feel sad when patients and their families do not understand and appreciate what you’ve tried to do for them only.” LIU PENG, heart surgeon
suffering from Marfan Syndrome and needed to be operated on for a chance to survive. However, a medical material needed for the operation was not available at the hospital then. To save the life of the patient, Liu proposed that the family directly contact the producer to get the material and they did so. However, the operation proved to be a failure and the patient died. Despite the fact that it is common for the dangerous operation to fail and the patient’s family had signed a consent form for the operation exempting the surgeon from responsibility if the operation was not successful, the family accused Liu of collaboration with the medical material producer. Liu said that although he had no connection with the producer, in the end, the hospital paid the patient’s family compensation.
“You just feel sad when patients and their families do not understand and appreciate what you’ve tried to do for them,” Liu said. “Such disputes with patients do dampen doctors’ enthusiasm. Strict implementation of the law is needed to protect the legal rights and interests of doctors.”
With an increasing number of disputes between doctors and patients occurring and medical workers usually turning out to be the disadvantaged party, very few top senior high school students are choosing to take up medicine nowadays. Whether the development of the overall healthcare provision in the country will see progress in the future and whether medical science will have bright prospects or not, is cause for concern.
Liu will not allow his assistant to do an operation on his own until he has assisted at a minimum of 50 operations for fear that a slip of error by his assistant may possibly get him involved in a dispute with a patient. Although caution is never too much when it comes to the safety of an operation, it is equally important for young surgeons to accumulate experience by performing operations on their own with the guidance of their teachers.
Liu has five years before he retires at the age of 60. He is looking forward to life after retirement. He needs to train someone who is as skillful as he is and as dedicated to the work as he is to take over from him. That is what he is trying to accomplish.