Health Guide: Essential Health Information for Beijing Families
The 2013-2014 beijingkids Health Guide is the latest resource for Beijing families dedicated to providing information on family health care, maternity, eating and breathing safety, mental health, emergency care and traditional Chinese Medicine. Articles from the guide will be featured twice a week on our website. Find the full version here.
From the editor
One autumn day ten years ago, my mother told me over the phone that she had discovered a lump in her armpit.
It had just been a few years since my father had passed from stomach cancer – an ordeal from which none of us had fully recovered – and I felt the all-too familiar pangs of dread welling in my gut as my mother described how she had gone in for a test and that the results would not be out for two weeks.
Although she tried her best to downplay things and reassured me not to worry, I sensed the trepidation in my mother’s voice as we moved on to talk about other more mundane topics.
When we received word from her doctor that she did in fact have Stage Two Breast Cancer and that it had already spread to her lymph nodes and caused the lumps to grow under her arms, it felt as though my family was the butt of an incredibly cruel cosmic joke. I spent the rest of the day at work in a daze and the rest of the evening feverishly Googling ‘invasive carcinomas’ and ‘Stage 2 metastatic breast cancer’ until resigning myself to a few hours of restive sleep.
It wasn’t long after that my mother had a complete mastectomy – the first of what would turn out to be an eight-year saga multiple surgeries and seemingly endless rounds of treatments and therapies (pills, injections, radiation, chemo – the whole nine yards).
Things were looking up for a while after that initial surgery. My mother recovered and settled into her new life and began spending most of her time in Beijing to be closer to my wife and me and her new granddaughter. Cancer seemed a distant memory as we were all lulled into our daily routines.
But four years later, during Beijing’s Olympic summer, it came back, screaming in our faces and here to stay.
Keep reading on beijing-kids.com or click here to see the Health Guide in full.
Some of the articles covering the seven areas (family health care, maternity, eating and breathing safety, mental health, emergency care and traditional Chinese Medicine) within the guide will be featured once a week on our website.
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