Zhang Hongmin (second from right) with other doctors from Peking Union Medical College Hospital's assistance team to help fight COVID-19 in Wuhan, Hubei province.[Photo provided to China Daily]
Zhang Hongmin, 45, a doctor of critical care medicine at Peking Union Medical College Hospital, celebrated the Chinese New Year on Jan 24 with his mother, his wife－who had just moved to Beijing after two years of having to live apart due to work commitments－and his young daughter.
A day later, he was assigned to the hospital's medical assistance team being dispatched to Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, to help in the fight against the COVID-19 outbreak.
At the time, the city was the national epicenter of the then-epidemic, and he arrived there less than a day after receiving the notice of his deployment. The team took over the ICU zone of Tongji Hospital's Zhongfa Xincheng branch and set themselves up to begin treating the most critically ill patients being transferred there from other hospitals and zones.
Operating in the city from Jan 26 until April 15, the 186-member PUMCH team was one of the first to arrive in Wuhan but the last national medical assistance team to leave.
He remembers that it was an arduous tour of duty, involving many significant moments for him and the team.
One of the most critical rescues to stand out in Zhang's memory was that of a patient who presented difficulties during intubation.
"That patient had serious pneumonia and respiratory failure with low blood sugar and high heart rate, and we needed to keep performing bag valve mask ventilation on the patient until he was successfully intubated," Zhang recalls.
He and two other doctors took turns operating the handheld ventilation device for an hour－using one hand to hold the mask and the other hand to squeeze the bag through five layers of gloves. They all faced the danger of getting infected by aerosol discharge.
Zhang (center) treats a COVID-19 patient. [Photo provided to China Daily]
"It was quite tiresome and the fingers get numb, but the minute you ease off, even a little bit, the patient might die," Zhang says. "In this instance, the patient was only in his 50s, he is still young."
When they finally got the patient intubated, they were all soaked with sweat.
"We always said we were on a battlefield since we arrived in Wuhan, and in that moment I realized that the doctors next to me were indeed my comrades in arms," Zhang says.
Noticing that some of the ICU patients were, naturally, anxious and fearful, he tried his best to offer comfort by talking with them or helping them to make video calls with family.
"Imagine being one of the patients? You wake up in a ward that is full of people in protective equipment, you cannot see their faces clearly, and you are intubated and cannot talk. How scary is that?" Zhang says.
The doctor has a Band-Aid on his nose scratched by long hours of wearing tight N95 face masks. [Photo provided to China Daily]
To communicate with Zhang, the patients would write down questions, asking if they would recover, or when they could be discharged. Sometimes it would be simple requests to contact family or asking for something to eat. Zhang always tried his best to fulfill the patients' needs.
Li Zenghui, 32, an ICU nurse with the PUMCH team, arrived in Wuhan on Feb 7.
The following day, as she was entering the ward for the first time, a bit nervous, she saw Zhang walking out after a typically long shift.
"I saw the skin on both sides of his nose scraped with blood, because he was too skinny and the face mask was too tight," Li recalls.
Li remembers that the first month in Wuhan was stressful for both doctors and nurses, as seriously ill COVID-19 patients kept coming, and there was not even time for them to indulge in sentiment for the patients they were unable to save.
"In those first few days, there was a constant line of ambulances in front of the hospital waiting to send patients in," Li recalls.
She recalls that, when they were working in Wuhan, nurses could leave after a four-hour shift, while the doctors might have to extend their six-hour shift until the next one ended if they were in the middle of an operation when the changeover took place.
Zhang once worked nearly 12 hours straight. He remembers one particular instance, after a long, busy shift, when he was leaving the ward and one seriously ill patient was being wheeled in, but he decided not to stay.
"I felt suffocated by my protective gear and I decided to leave. Otherwise I might have collapsed, and my colleagues all understood. If my body was in a better condition, I would have stayed," Zhang says.
Zhang (front) checks the condition of a seriously ill patient.[Photo provided to China Daily]
After his shift in the wards, Zhang needed to call the patients' families and update them of their loved-one's condition.
On one occasion, after speaking to one patient's family member, he was told that they were on the way to another hospital because they were also infected.
"I felt bad for the patient, but all we could do was to try and save as many patients as possible," Zhang says.
He says as an ICU doctor, one has to adapt themselves to accepting the truth that not all patients can be saved.
Zhang says he felt mentally OK when he returned from Wuhan. However, the psychological test conducted by his hospital showed that he still needed time to recover from his experiences there.
Zhang started his career in the cardiothoracic surgery department, where he watched senior doctors operate and became interested by the work in the ICU, where the patients were looked after following their surgery.
In 2005, he turned his focus to critical care medicine, and he enjoyed the sense of achievement he got when a patient was saved from the brink of death.
"When you see your patient after they are fully recovered, they look like a totally different person than when they were in the ICU, which feels good," Zhang explains.
Zhang says to be a good critical care medicine doctor takes a dedication to the job, which brings great pressure and needs sharp focus on the constantly changing conditions of the patients.
"You need to make judgments quickly, as it's a profession that has a very low tolerance for error－often, there is not much time for you to save your patient's life."
Zhang originally planned to take his family out of Beijing for the Spring Festival holiday, but the outbreak changed that plan.
When he returned home at the end of April, with schools conducting classes online due to the pandemic, Zhang has been able to enjoy more time with his daughter Zhang Mulan.
She wrote him a letter four days after he left for Wuhan in January.
"Dad, you are at the front line of the fight against the epidemic, there must be many patients who are in a dangerous condition. You are an ICU doctor who treats the patients closely and fights the virus directly. I worry about you every day, so please take good care of yourself," his daughter writes. "Only by protecting yourself well can you save more patients' lives."
Zhang Hongmin says his aunt told him that his mother, who likes to watch TV dramas, turned the channel to watch the news each day while he was working in Wuhan.
"She only resumed watching her TV shows when I came back to Beijing," Zhang Hongmin says.
