Only I Wasn't

When I first noticed the couple from Jishui, they looked like any other elderly couple from the Jiangxi countryside. The man sat on a bench outside the hospital, dressed simply in dark, practical clothes. Beside him sat his wife, equally plainly dressed. Neither of them was talking. Like so many other patients in the hospital grounds, he was looking down at his phone, scrolling quietly while his wife sat beside him. There was nothing immediately distinctive about them until we started talking.

He told me that he was from Jishui, Ji'an. When he had first been diagnosed, the doctors did not tell him everything immediately. "They kept asking whether I wanted to come here for further examination." He already knew what that probably meant. "When they said I needed to go to a cancer hospital, I had an idea." His family tried to hide the diagnosis from him. His son and grandchildren avoided telling him what was actually happening. They told him that the doctors thought surgery was possible. His son encouraged him to do it. "If they can operate, then we should operate." He agreed. Or at least, he understood that there was little point in refusing. When the day of surgery came, he was surprisingly calm. “I was not afraid at all,” he said matter-of-factly, "There were doctors and nurses there." He trusted the people around him. Once he was lying on the operating table, he stopped worrying. 

What surprised me most was what happened afterwards. When he woke from anesthesia, his first question was not whether he was alive or whether the operation had gone well. He asked his son: "How much did they remove from my lung?" His son told him that the doctors had removed only one lobe. “It was not much. Just relax.” And so he did. His operation had taken place nearly two years earlier. He subsequently completed four rounds of chemotherapy. During chemotherapy, treatments were administered every three weeks. After finishing, he had to return for regular follow-up examinations every three months. Last year, he went back for three checkups. This year, he had already gone five times. The cancer had become part of the family's calendar, but he did not seem particularly troubled by the routine. Perhaps the routine itself was reassuring. As long as there was another appointment, another checkup, another reason to return to the hospital, there was still something concrete to do.

His family, on the other hand, had worried much more than he had. The day of his operation, his son came. His daughter came. His son-in-law came. Other relatives came too. Everyone was on the edge. He laughed when we talked about it, "They were also so nervous. Only I wasn’t." It sounded almost like a joke, but it seemed to reflect something fundamental about him. He had made a decision once the doctors had explained the situation, and after that, there was little point in frightening himself over what he could no longer control. His doctors had told him the problem was manageable. After surgery, they said, he simply needed to recover. He simply followed the treatment plan and got better.

He had come back to the hospital again recently for another follow-up. He and his wife still came downstairs every day. For him, walking was part of recovery. Staying in the ward felt oppressive. "You get uncomfortable just sitting in there." Outside, he could see the sky. He could move around. He could talk to people. The difference was immediate. A hospital room could make someone feel trapped, he said. Going downstairs opened up the world again.

His wife rarely spoke during our conversation. She simply remained beside him, but her presence explained something about his recovery. He might have been the patient, but she was part of the routine too. They went downstairs together. There was no need for them to talk constantly. After spending decades together, perhaps silence itself had become a kind of companionship.

Downstairs, he also talked to other patients. He had met people from different parts of Jiangxi. He had met a fellow patient from Jishui the day before. That patient was about to go home after surgery. The two men had exchanged contact information and talked about going together to collect medication, although he himself was busy that day and planned to go the next. "You get used to talking to people here," he told me. The common starting point was always the same: Where are you from? Why are you here? How long have you been hospitalized? And sometimes, before long, strangers became something closer to acquaintances. A shared dialect helped a lot: it made the hospital feel slightly less foreign.

When illness first arrived, his family had tried to protect him by hiding the truth, but eventually he learned what had happened. He had undergone surgery and chemotherapy and had spent nearly two years returning for follow-up examinations. And now he was sitting outside the hospital with his wife, scrolling through his phone. His life had narrowed for a while around treatment, but it had not disappeared into it.

Perhaps most importantly, he still seemed to believe that there was little use in being afraid of something once you had done what you could. "都是命啊," he said at one point. Everyone eventually has to face illness, aging, and death. But he did not say it with despair. He said it almost as an explanation for why he continued living. Why, even after cancer had entered his life, he continued to make room for ordinary things, like a walk downstairs, a conversation with other patients and another day of hope.