A smile can be the most precious medicine

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March 20, 2015

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A smile can be the most precious medicine

By Wang Yong | March 20, 2015, Friday |

Print Edition

“Is she good?” a nursing assistant jokingly asked my bed-ridden father, pointing at her fellow assistant who was holding and massaging my father’s hands.

They were both middle-aged women, making fun of each other to amuse my 88-year-old dad as he recovers from a surgery on a fracture at a major hospital in my hometown, Yangzhou, in neighboring Jiangsu Province.

“Is she good?” my dad repeated in murmured amusement, a clear answer apparently eluding him because of the lingering effect of the anaesthetic.

“If she is not good, I will teach her a lesson,” continued the joking assistant, raising her arm and pretending to beat her colleague.

“Look at her round eyes!” my dad murmured, sounding both surprised and amused by the nursing assistant’s fierce expression. “Will she really start a fight?”

On cue, the two nursing assistants feigned a scuffle. Dad waved his hands to suggest a truce and then burst into a hearty laughter when he saw that he had “brokered” a “ceasefire.”

Such is the merry atmosphere at the No. 1 People’s Hospital of Yangzhou, where many nurses and nursing assistants go out of their way to soothe the pain of a patient not just through medical skills, but also with sunny smiles.

Indeed, smiles are part and parcel of a successful convalescence plan.

While his fracture surgery was successful, Dad has found it difficult to urinate on his own, in part due to lying in bed for too long.

Soft words

Sometimes Dad would unwittingly wet the bed, and the nurses and their assistants were there to comfort him with smiles and soft words.

“You cannot scold an elderly patient for that,” said Sister Xu, the joking nursing assistant. “You’ve got to speak softly, encouraging him to urinate whenever he feels like doing it. This way he may regain his bladder power to urinate.” This is also the advice I’ve received from nurses in convalescence centers in Shanghai.

Concerned about Dad’s problem, I visited a convalescence center run by Red Cross in Qingpu District, last month. The smiling duty nurse received me with great patience and offered sage advice.

“Put a hot water bottle on your dad’s stomach or massage his stomach,” said the nurse, who is in her 30s. “However often he unwittingly wets the bed, change him. Don’t loathe these frequent changes.”

Last week, I visited Shanghai Wenjie Nursing Home in Changning District.

The head nurse, in her 40s, greeted me with a smile and patiently answered all my questions as we stood and talked in the crowded corridor for nearly an hour.

She then referred me to the doctor on duty, who listened to me and then said: “If your dad wets the bed, remember, this is actually a good thing. Don’t be annoyed.

“Smile to him, so that he will feel free to urinate. This is very important in restoring his bladder power.”

We hear much from the media about doctor-patient relationship gone awry — reports of doctors assaulted or even killed by patients unhappy with treatment, or of patients suspicious that doctors are just out to get as much of their cash as possible.

We’ve forgotten that in the everyday, the stories can be quite different.

At the No.1 People’s Hospital of Yangzhou, many doctors and nurses take it upon themselves to smile to patients whenever they make the rounds of their wards.

In my dad’s case, they even try to sing old revolutionary songs familiar to him, so as to keep his brain active and to keep him in good spirits.

A smile goes a long way in soothing the pain of a patient. A smile is at once the “cheapest” and “most expensive” therapy.

It is “cheapest” because it has no production cost. It is “most expensive” because it encapsulates all the positive energy of the person who gives the smile.

A smile to an elderly patient is especially valuable in today’s China, where children often work and live apart from their hospitalized parents.

So I take my hat off to those doctors and nurses who live up to the Confucian ideal that one should respect others’ parents, as well as their own parents.

Chinese Views

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A smile can be the most precious medicine

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