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Lu Huiqing: a life of healing
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Song Yingwen
WHAT is the most you would expect from an 86-year-old woman?
Like most people, I would definitely had answered “not much" to this question. But this changed when I met Madam Lu Huiqing recently.
The first thing which strikes you upon meeting Madam Lu, who was one of China's earliest advanced nursing students and has taught that subject for, incredible as it may seem, nearly 68
years, is her glowing health.
Time, it seems, has lost track of her. Though in the ninth decade of her life, her eyes are still clear and expressive, and she walks upright and proud.
She walks briskly and goes up and down stares without a second thought, even though she is still recovering from a fractured leg she received two months ago. Her quick-witted responses to questions swiftly dispel prejudice against aged people, and her undying passion for life comes through loud and clear.
Being the honorary consultant of the School of Nursing of the Sun Yet-Sen Medical School (SUMS), she is still active at the school even in her 80s. She rendered outstanding efforts in promoting the establishment last year of masters-level nursing courses at the school. She talks to freshmen every year at the school's opening ceremony, encouraging them to devote themselves wholeheartedly to nursing. She helps to receive foreign visitors to promote further communication in nursing between China and western countries. She volunteers to translate articles in English into Chinese so that more new ideas in nursing can be introduced. And she even takes classes in nursing research to continue her study.
Madam Lu attributes all this activity to two things: her love of nursing and the excellent education she has received. “Being a nurse, I know how to take care of myself. And being an educated nurse, I can do more to contribute," Lu says.
Being a nurse
But working as a nurse was not her first dream. Her family, which once ran a successful seafood business in Japan in the early 1920s', gave her the first aspiration in life: to be an economist. But the vicissitudes of life changed her.
Madam Lu, the ninth child of her parents, was born to a Chinese family in Japan in 1914. Her once wealthy family left her a sweet memory of early childhood. The situation continued until the family moved to Macao in 1919, where her father passed away. The year after that, the whole family left Macao for Guangzhou and Lu's eldest brother, who was 27 years older than her and a philosophy professor in Lingnan University, took up the responsibility of supporting the whole family.
Lu's decision to become a nurse was made in her last year of study at the True Light School, a boarding school for girls run by American missionaries in Guangzhou where she spent 12 years studying. The idea was brought to her by the dean of nursing from Beijing Union Medical College where the first baccalaureate programme for nursing in China was set up. The girl was deeply impressed by the baccalaureate programme.
“Frankly speaking I had little idea about nursing at that time, but I had a tremendous interest in their programme. So I decided to become a nurse," Madam Lu said.
The idea of being a nurse is not being well accepted even today by some people, and we can imagine the picture 70 years ago. Even Lu's elder brother, a professor who was open
enough to support all his sisters being educated, objected to it:
“Why a nurse? Isn't it better to be a doctor?"
But Lu persisted. She registered for the entrance exam of Beijing Union Medical College of her own will in 1933 and set off to Beijing after being admitted without the slightest hesitation.
A complacent smile crept on Lu's face as she recalled these long-ago events. “I guess I was stubborn, but somehow I was determined to be a nurse. I stuck to my decision and I won.
I was never sorry for my choice," she said.
It would have been easy for Madam Lu to regret her career decision later on but she never did, not in the days working day and night attending to poor coal miners suffering from carcinoma; not in the days of demotion to the worst conditions and tending to the most horrendous of wounds and infections during the dark days of the Cultural Revolution; not as she watched her colleagues get promoted after switching from nursing to doctors, and definitely not now as she continues her efforts to promoting new developments in nursing.
“I can't explain why, but I guess it's because of what we called the nursing feeling. The moment I put on a nurse's uniform, I can't resist the desire to attend to the sick and injured," she said.
Actually she hesitated when she was offered the chance of a transfer to a posting as a full doctor. “But just for very a short time. Because the more I do, the more I get to know how important a nurse is. We have a saying, which goes like this: to recover from illness, you count 30 percent on medical treatment and 70 percent on nursing. How can we live without nurses?" she asked.
Being an educated nurse
But Madam Lu's long career contains much more than simple ministering to the sick.
She was the supervisor and instructor to students of nursing when she worked in the Beijing Union Medical School Hospital after graduation and later, in 1945, at the Chongqing Center Nursing School. She helped establish the Zhongshan Nursing School in Shanghai in 1947. She was dean of the School of Nursing of Shanghai Medical College from 1949 to 1956. She was appointed to establish the First Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical College in 1956 till the Culture Revolution descended in 1966.
She continued to further her education even after she retired. To help establish the Faculty of Nursing in the SUMS, she made a proposal to the head of the university that the bachelor degree course, which was stopped in 1953, be reestablished in China in 1983, and offered to write the course curriculum. She was actively involved in restructuring the faculty into a school of nursing and setting up master's degree courses. To honor her outstanding contribution, a scholarship in her name was set up by the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine in the USA.
She did all these because she knows how important education is to a nurse.
The first person to jump into Madam Lu's mind when speaking of education was her elder brother. Her heart is still filled with sincere gratitude to him even after all these years. “Life was difficult then. But my brother insisted on getting best education for all his 10 brothers and sisters. Had it not been for his strong will and wise decision, I wouldn't become what I am today," she says often.
The years of study in Beijing, from which she got a nursing diploma as well as a bachelor degree of science, had a great impact on her. There she received professional training in nursing and mastered English.
According to Lu, a good nurse must have three “H's": a kind heart, a good head and dexterous hands. And education helps to a foundation of knowledge in nurses.
“Being a nurse is much more than giving injections and medicine. A qualified nurse is a good attendant as well as an observer and communicator who can provide professional service not only physically but also psychologically. This is extremely important for future nurses, for nursing is no longer a service required by patients in hospital. It has become a need to the aged and disabled at home. Therefore we need highly educated nurses," Madam Lu says.
“I am an ordinary person in an ordinary post. All I wish is to see more people join us in this field. People call nurses angels, and it's a beautiful thing to be an angel, isn't it?" the old lady ends the interview with a bright smile.
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