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Talking about the greatest love on earth…In a shabby
house in a small village in Taizhou, Zhejiang province, 30-year-old Fu
Xuepeng has been lying in bed since a car ran over his motorcycle 5
years ago.
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His entire body, neck and down, is paralyzed.
After his family can no longer afford to keep him in the hospital, he
was taken home.
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Unable to afford a ventilator, his parents picked up a BVM and started
to bag air into his lungs 24/7 non-stop for the next 5 years.
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The bag needs to be squeezed 18 times per minute. That’s 25,920 times
per day and more than 800,000 times per month.
And Fu’s father Fu Minzu and mother Yu Lanqin kept their bagging speed
at 18 times per minute for 5 years, because their son would die if they
stopped for at most 3 minutes. Their hands grow malformed due to too
much squeezing.
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Their life was actually easier in recent years. Fu’s younger brother saw
a TV program on how to DIY simple ventilators a few years ago.
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With a small generator, a governor and a push arm, the family managed to
assemble a home-made ventilator. While the machine freed Fu’s parents
from non-stop squeezing, it also came with expensive electricity bills.
To save the 140-150 yuan bill every month, Fu’s parents only turn on the
machine during sleeping time, and still bag air manually during the day.
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This is not the first story this year about poor Chinese using home-made
medical devices to maintain life (and it’s only January).
Earlier this month, a man named Hu Songwen from Nantong, Jiangsu
province, was reported to keep himself alive for 13 years with a
home-made dialysis machine.
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The two stories really highlighted China’s problem with healthcare for
the poor. The Chinese government has been pushing universal healthcare
for many years now. But due to the country’s large population and the
lack of proper infrastructures, especially in rural areas, there are
still vast troops of poor people that are either not covered or only
covered for the most basic. Even in China’s better-developed big cities,
most working-class families cannot afford to get sick.
The only good news is that the Chinese people are always willing to
help. The story of Fu and his incredible parents have been making waves
on Sina Weibo, China’s leading microblogging service. Numerous charity
organizations and Weibo celebrities have called for donations to Fu’s
family. For example, famous investor 薛蛮子 was able to collect more than
RMB 100k donations within less than 10 hours. At least we know now that
Fu’s family has a new hope. |