Previously his life was countdown,
Now it's "positive timing".
Author: Chen Jiali
Wang Seventeen never needed an alarm clock on weekdays.
Sleep for up to 8 hours, and his "plugged heart" will wake him up with a tick, reminding him that it's time to change the battery. Slowly, his own unique biological clock formed, and he naturally woke up at the point.
Otherwise, the consequences can be much more serious than being late to work, and it will kill people!
Wang Seventeen, a northeastern man who looks fast on the outside, if he does not lift his vest, he will reveal the wire extending from his body and the battery connected in his pocket, which is no different from ordinary people.
"Show you something good, this is China's first (batch) artificial heart." On the stage of the talk show convention, as soon as he took the stage, he took out the battery from his pocket to recharge his heart. The audience instantly widened their eyes, put away their smiles, covered their mouths, and prepared to be "captured" by a poignant story.
"Don't worry, I'm not bringing goods, and ordinary people can't afford this equipment." Immediately after, his words amused everyone again.
Wang XVII on the stage of the talk show convention.
In 2019, Wang Seventeen replaced with an artificial heart and revived from the brink of death. From then on, the beating of his heart was replaced by a spinning mechanical blood pump.
At the same time, the two batteries and three wires he carried with him became a "burden" that he could never get rid of. Someone else's day is 24 hours, and his day is "8+8+8" composed of battery standby time. Once, when getting off the subway, his wire was hooked by someone else's umbrella, and "this life was almost confessed." Another time he was driving himself, got out of the car in a hurry, and the power line was almost torn off by the seat belt.
Just in case, even if it is hot in summer, he has to put on a vest and protect this set of equipment, which is to save this life.
"Like living in hell"
In 2007, Wang Seventeen, who was a mathematics teacher in Shenyang, participated in the school sports day. The two students fought, and he rushed to persuade, but he fell headlong to the ground.
"At that time, the students probably wondered, this is not to touch porcelain..." Recalling the first experience of being "knocked down" by heart disease, Wang Seventeen could still play with the "Global People" reporter.
At that visit, he first heard about dilated cardiomyopathy. The doctor explained to him that, in layman's terms, this disease is equivalent to "heart cancer". The ejection value of a normal person's heart is 50%-70%, and his only about 35% is weakened to the point that the ventricle cannot output enough blood to the artery. There is only one solution – heart transplantation.
Wang Seventeen was completely confused. Out of the hospital, he came to a nearby mall, sat on the steps, and looked at the revolving door in a daze. "At that time, I thought, so many people coming and going are fine, why is it me who is unlucky!"
Originally, he also wanted to follow the doctor's advice to take medicine, adjust his work and rest, slow down the pace of life, not in a hurry, not on fire, not to party, not to exercise, and take good care of this heart. But after a long time of careful persistence, he went to the hospital for a reexamination, and the doctor still frowned and told him, "Your disease is very serious."
If nothing works, he is frustrated.
"Seeing that everyone around me is drinking, exercising, and enjoying life, only I lie in bed and take a lot of medicine, the key is that no matter how hard I try, the situation will not get better, I thought, love it."
He began to beat himself up, how to do it, drinking, smoking, skiing, and even signed up for the Shenyang Marathon in 2012 and ran halfway. "At that time, I thought it would be good if I suddenly fell down while running and couldn't get up again."
Going for a run is not entirely for gambling, Wang Seventeen told reporters, in fact, it is "enjoying the feeling of sweating after exercise, at least to prove that he is still alive".
Every season change is the hardest time. For example, from the beginning of October to the end of November, Wang Seventeen was like "living in hell", with poor breathing, nausea and vomiting, no strength at all, and sometimes sitting suddenly felt like someone was pulling him behind, and he fell down at once.
While waiting for death, while saving money, Wang Seventeen could do these two things in those years.
The doctor told him that the person who could provide him with a transplantable heart must be in the same condition as him: about 1.9 meters tall, type A blood, preferably a northerner, preferably younger than him. These conditions add up to the fact that it is basically impossible to meet.
But in order to survive, he needs to save money and be ready at all times.
In order to save money for "changing hearts", he endured fatigue and difficulty breathing while standing on the podium to lecture. The students listened to the homeroom teacher talk about the physical condition of the mathematics teacher Wang Seventeen, and they cried snot and tears one by one, but the next day, they should not hand in their homework. He continued to fight wits and courage with the students.
It was too slow to save money by relying on dead wages alone, and in those years, he did everything that could make money, such as investing in retail housing and doing overseas import distribution.
The life-saving "magic heart"
In the past ten years when Wang Seventeen was sick, the person who changed the most in the family was his mother.
Since his parents divorced at the age of 10, Wang Seventeen's life has almost missed the role of father. A strong mother who always makes the atmosphere at home tense.
Mom compared him with "other people's children", and the education method is also typical of the scolding education of the older generation of parents in the northeast. The big and small things in the family are decided by the mother alone, and Wang Seventeen only has an obedient share. His relationship with his mother was not far away for a time.
In August 2019, Wang Seventeen's condition deteriorated, and it was difficult to breathe almost every time. After being sent to the hospital by a friend, from registration to all examinations, Wang Seventeen basically completed it alone, and even signed it himself. Finally, the hospital's critical illness notice, demanding that family members must be called, he called his mother.
As soon as my mother entered the ward, she became angry and said, "Don't you tell me if you died", and then turned and slammed the door to go out.
"After talking to the doctor, when she came back, her whole person changed, like a child, she had no idea at all, and asked me 'should I sign'." At that moment, Wang Seventeen felt that his mother was old and could not withstand things.
Regarding the question of whether to sign or not, Wang Seventeen actually didn't matter for a long time. "At that time, the state was like a person grabbing the edge of a cliff, persevering for more than ten years, running out of strength, and just wanted to let go."
But my mother was really anxious, and said to him in a particularly humble tone: "Count my mother beg you, ask the doctor in Beijing again to see if there is any hope." ”
Wang Seventeen couldn't hold back all of a sudden. "I hope that at least while my mother is alive, I will live and not let her suffer that sin."
That night, he called a 120 ambulance and drove directly to Beijing. He still remembers the appearance of that journey very clearly: "I saw all the light points and scenery outside the window regressing rapidly, like entering a time-space tunnel at the end of life." ”
Doctors in Beijing offered him another possibility - a magnetic levitation artificial heart independently developed by the mainland.
Because it was still in the clinical trial stage, in order to relieve Wang XVII's doubts, the developer slammed an artificial heart on the table in front of him. No matter how you fall, it will always rotate at an angle. This magnetic levitation adhesion has proven to be stronger and more reliable than metal rods.
This "magical" technology, let Wang Seventeen see the hope of life. He immediately decided: surgery!
Before the operation, my mother took a photo of Wang Seventeen.
Surgery coupled with coma, he lay for two days before waking up. At the time, the nurse was feeding him breakfast through a nasogastric tube. Due to the damage to the audio cords during the operation, he could not make sounds, only felt twisted all over, and slightly raised his head to look at his body.
That scene made him unforgettable for life:
Three tubes were inserted into the chest to drain the fluid generated by the surgery, and the tubes still had something like blood stains. Further down, there is a wire in the stomach that connects to the heart machine. The entire small arm was blue and swollen from the needle prick. Some tape is tied to the feet. Several black circles marked with black markers, irregularly distributed throughout the body. The entire body was coated with yellow potions, and the potions that had dried condensed in the folds of the skin...
"You've seen the way Wolverine is transformed in the movie, it's that kind of visual sense, but it's also a bit like Avatar, because you can hardly tell the original appearance of the skin."
Turning his gaze away from his battered body, he looked at the ceiling, tears welling up at once.
It took him half a day to accept the sick body.
Seeing that he was depressed, the nurse proposed to open a little window to breathe. The windows in the ICU are locked all year round, and only a small one can be moved. When the fresh air with the fragrance of green grass drifted in through the window, Wang Seventeen came to life.
"Really, I haven't breathed so freely in more than ten years, just like when I was a child, I sucked in it wantonly, and then felt the cold feeling in my lungs."
Wang XVII after surgery.
Turn on "Positive Timekeeping"
Wang Seventeen, who had "died" once, found that at the end of his life, he regretted the most that he had hurried through the world and left nothing.
During the next year of bed practice, he pondered repeatedly, and finally decided to write his experience into a paragraph and express it in the form of a talk show.
Wang Seventeen's first contact with offline talk shows was in 2017. At that time, his physical condition was not very good, and his depressed emotions needed to be vented, so he saw a talk show.
That time, he was originally going to participate in an open microphone event, wanting to listen to it and relax, but when he signed up, he entered the wrong entrance, and when he went, he found that he was going to go on stage to tell a joke.
Not surprisingly, the scene was terrible, and he was like giving a parent-teacher meeting to the audience. He used all the tricks in the classroom to adjust the atmosphere, and there was no reaction from the audience. Until finally, he came up with a so-called "elementary school math problem", which suddenly "exploded".
At that time, most of his talk show content revolved around students and the classroom. After the surgery, he began to talk about his experience. "I hope that through my jokes, some patients who want to give up will understand that if they insist on persistence, life-saving technology will soon appear."
Wang XVII.
The biggest question is, how to rub your tragic life experience into a joke, and make the audience laugh?
The first time he talked about the heart, it wasn't funny at all. "The audience in the front row looked at me with bitter faces, as if it was easier to ask them for money than to laugh."
The first time he did a special session, he was so nervous that he forgot to change the battery before going on the field. With 20 minutes to go, the artificial heart rings every 5 minutes. At that time, he was already panicking on the stage, but he was still subconsciously looking for a stem, "My heart called me and told me it was not very comfortable." The audience does not know how dangerous it is behind the sound.
Participating in the talk show conference, what ranking, elimination, traffic, these do not matter to him. "Unlike other actors' motivations, I simply like this group of people, I want to get to know each other, and at the same time, tell my own story, and come back to continue to recuperate."
Wang Seventeen spoke on stage.
Now with this "artificial heart", Wang Seventeen has many "big taboos": can't get close to the induction cooker, can't take the subway security gate, can't swim, can't stay up late, can't be naked...
Every time he was "bound" by these rules, he took a deep breath and told himself: the price of being able to breathe freely is worth it!
After the operation, Wang XVII walked briskly for 5 kilometers every day.
Now he has the final say at home, and his mother speaks much more gently, praising her son as "amazing" when everyone else, relying on his own decision to save his life.
The maximum life expectancy of foreign patients surviving on artificial hearts is 15 years. Wang Seventeen hopes to break another record by his own efforts. "Life used to be a countdown, now it's a 'positive time', and every extra day you live is an extra day to earn."
Director system: Lu Hong
Executive Producer: Zhang Jiankui
Chief Editor: Xu Chenjing
Editor: Su Rui