| TASHI Wangmu, which means auspicious fairy in Tibetan, was a popular name
for a Tibetan girl. But just before Tashi Wangmu was born in Lhasa, Soviet cosmonaut
Yuri Gagarin successfully completed his orbit in space around the earth, in Vostok 1
spaceship on April 8, 1961, the first in human history.
Jigqing, Tashi Wangmu's father and then a young staff member working at the regional
Youth League headquarters, decided to give his new-born daughter an exceptional new name
in memory of Gagarin.
"So I have this Han name," says Yu Fei, now a 38-year-old doctor who is chief
of internal medicine and vice-president of (Lhoka) People's Hospital.
Yu means space and Fei flight. Although Yu Fei has never dreamed of joining in space
research or even a flight into the space, she has made her own steady journey to scale the
medical heights.
She has won so much respect for her expertise that she is on call for almost 24 hours.
Sometimes a telephone call comes to call her back to the hospital as soon as she steps in
the door of her home.
"She is the best in her field in the prefecture," says Duan Xiangzheng, a
local official.
"For we doctors, time is life,"Yu Fei says.
In 1987, about 30 to 40 patients were rushed to the People's Hospital, all suffering
from a high fever, an eruption of red spots on the chest and abdomen and severe intestinal
irritation.
Opinions differed among the doctors, but Yu Fei was one of the very few doctors to come
up with the correct diagnosis of typhoid. Immediate treatment and other measures
effectively prevented the infectious disease from spreading in Shannan Prefecture, Tibet
Autonomous Region. Her paper summarizing the experience, and its further suggestions for
preventive measures, won her a regional award for scientific and technological progress.
In 1994, she led the hospital into beginning all-around diagnosis of heart diseases so
that the Tibetans in the vicinity no longer had to travel hundreds of kilometres to Lhasa,
or even thousands of kilometres to Chengdu for specialist opinions.
"We've so far found congenital heart troubles in three Tibetan children," Yu
Fei says. The diagnosis was prompt enough for all the children to receive corrective heart
surgery in good time.
Also in 1994, Yu Fei pushed for the establishment of a special coronary care unit (CCU)
within the hospital.
Before 1994, the hospital had a very gloomy record for patients suffering from heart
failure as the result of acute myocardial infarction or other serious heart troubles.
"The death rate was almost 100 per cent because we simply administered drugs that
helped increase the blood flow in the heart," Yu Fei says. "But our measures
often didn't work."
According to international studies, of those likely to die during the first two weeks
after a major heart attack, 40 per cent will die within one hour of its onset and another
20 per cent within the next three hours.
"During the 18 months I was taking advanced training as a resident doctor in Huaxi
Medical University in Chengdu, I observed no patient died of heart failure at its
CCU," Yu Fei says.
She sought advice from the specialists at Huaxi's CCU. Apart from well-trained
personnel, Yu Fei also learned that resuscitation teams at Huaxi's CCU administered drugs
that not only help with the blood circulation in the heart but also assist the heart to
absorb more oxygen and thus have a better chance to recover.
"Yu Fei studied hard here at Huaxi," says Zhang Maoshun, 61-year-old
professor and specialist in coronary heart diseases.
When she returned to the Shannan People's Hospital, she set out to train the hospital's
own resuscitation team and then opened its own CCU, the second in Tibet Autonomous Region.
Since 1994, the hospital has treated 19 patients with severe heart attacks and only two
died. "This year we received six patients and all survived," she says.
"Yu Fei has accumulated her own experience in making diagnosis and offering
emergency treatment for heart failures," says Zhang Maoshun. "The records of the
patients she has referred to us for implanting cardiac pacemakers show she has made the
best use of what she learned here."
As one of the first-generation Tibetans who received systematic training in Western
medicine since 1959, Yu Fei says, that of the two people she most admires in her life, one
is her father and the other her teacher of medicine.
Her father, Jigqing, grew up in Batang, Ganzi Tibet Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan
Province. At the age of 18, he came to Lhasa with the People's Liberation Army in the
early 1950s. Until his retirement, he served in local government in a number of counties
in the region.
"He often tells us to maintain our self-respect and integrity in our work,"
Yu Fei says.
While her father has set her an example for honesty, she says her teacher led her into
a career that requires hardwork and perseverance.
"Without the devotion of the people like my teacher, modern medicine would not
take root in Tibet," she says.
She recalls her teacher, Mu Chuanli, a Han from Beijing, as a strict mentor. "He
used to ask us a lot of hard questions and make us keep up with the medical advances at
both home and abroad," she says.
Her teacher attended to almost every emergency within the internal medicine department,
sometimes round the clock, even during his day off.
"I've tried to follow in my teacher's steps," she says.
The Shannan People's Hospital, established in the early 1960s in a small nunnery with
only oil lamps for lights, moved to a one-storey brick house a few years later.
The oil lamps were later replaced by candles, gas lights and finally electricity in the
1980s. "When I first worked in the hospital as a resident doctor, after completing my
medical training in college in the early 1980s, I still had to work by candlelight
sometimes because of the shortage of electricity then," she recalls.
At that time, doctors of paediatrics, internal medicine, gynaecology and obstetrics,
and surgery all shared the same office.
Today, the hospital has become a fully-fledged modern facility, with Tibetans
accounting for 95 per cent of the medical staff.
Promoted to the position of vice-president in charge of the medical development in the
hospital, Yu Fei says she is now trying to raise enough money to start a new research
project delving deeper into the heart diseases on the roof of the world.
"Generations of genetic selection have enabled most of we Tibetans to acquire a
heart that has adapted to the high altitude and the lack of oxygen," she says.
"But high altitude and the shortage of oxygen still cause manylocal peopleto suffer
from high altitude sickness."
Although she has obtained a fund of 60,000 yuan (US$7,228) from the Regional Science
and Technology Commission, Yu Fei says she still needs an additional 140,000 yuan
(US$16,867) to buy equipment, such as a motion electrocardiogram, that will enable her
team to start observing and following the changes of heart symptoms in her patients,
especially the elderly patients.
"Senior doctors of my teacher's generation have all retired and most have left
Tibet," she says. "It's we who must carry on the work and push for further
development in modern medical science in Tibet." |
