CITY GUIDE >Culture and Events
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CITY GUIDE >Culture and Events
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Finger on the pulse
By Qiu Yijiao (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-07-16 09:27
Though she performed nine cardiac surgeries the previous day, Gu Hong, 48, gets an early start to her morning rounds at Beijing's Anzhen Hospital by checking up on a young boy from Lhasa. While she pats him on the cheek, Gu asks his parents how many times he drank milk the previous day. Noticing a bump on his head, she becomes serious and asks the parents and nurses to look after him more carefully. Gu has a special feeling for the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. In her office, the coat rack is covered with hada, a long, white gauze cloth that Tibetans present to their honored guests. As the country's leading expert in congenital heart disease, Gu has visited Tibet seven times, providing free health checks and medical care for over 9,000 local children in the past five years. She says she is always touched by how the family members of her patients touch her face with their noses, in the Tibetan way, to show respect. "As a doctor, it is our mission to answer patients' calls," Gu says. "The Tibetans express their gratitude very frankly and in a lovely way. I feel closer to Tibet because of them." As the international medical director of "Touching Heart in Tibet", a program initiated by US-based Southeast Asia Prayer Center, Gu has sent more than 140 young patients to Anzhen Hospital for operations because it has better facilities. There are four Tibetan children at the hospital and Gu pays extra attention to them because their symptoms keep changing. "Children with heart disease from Tibet have many complications. When they come to the plains, they are vulnerable to new complications," she says. Working on the plateau has not been easy. Gu suffers from severe altitude sickness. She has to sit to get some sleep at night. "I know the difficulties well, so I invite different doctors to go with me each time. It requires much courage and we have to prepare both mentally and physically," Gu says. Last October she stood for 12 hours on a single day, doing seven surgeries, starting from 7 am. The clothing that Gu wore to protect her against X-rays weighed 10 kg. She had to constantly inhale oxygen to ensure the operations went smoothly. "Seven operations a day at an altitude of 3,700 m by a female doctor, I think, was a world record," Gu says proudly. |
