Being Alive Is Life's Greatest Gift

When life is going smoothly, people like to stockpile things. Money, for example.

Back then I often thought that saving a bit more money was like building a high wall on the wasteland of fate, strong enough to hold off whatever storms might come someday: some upheaval in the world, an unexpected accident, or an illness that comes on hard and fast.

People are always this naive. We think every test fate sets us can be bought off with worldly chips. Only when the real gale blows do we suddenly realize the high wall was just a sheet of paper.

When illness rises over your head like a flood, what can money actually do?

My mother was born in 1982. In 2024 she was diagnosed with a diffuse glioma, graded at the time as grade 2.

Grade 2 counted as a small mercy in a misfortune. Online there are countless grade 2 glioma patients who've lived for decades, and my mother's Ki-67 index was just 2%. Any way you looked at it, it seemed we should stay positive.

Two years have passed, and things haven't turned out as well as we hoped. Over the past year, her follow-up scans haven't looked good. Not only have the existing lesions kept growing, new ones have appeared.

Since September, my mother's body has changed completely. Her legs have grown weak, and she has to rest after a few steps. In the first half of the year she'd still walk a few kilometers on her own to dance with the square-dancing group in the park. Now even going out to buy groceries takes everything she has.

The change came on so fast. People in the middle of a change like this often don't notice it. We always think the future is still far away.

I took my mother to see Dr. Mao Qing, a neurosurgery specialist at West China Hospital.

Dr. Mao took one look at her scans and said: this one, I'm afraid, needs surgery.

Surgery? Actually, it wasn't the first time I'd heard the word this year. My mother's last follow-up was on September 12, 2026, and the results weren't good. Dr. Liao Xiaoling at Sichuan Provincial People's Hospital, who had looked after my mother for two years, also gave her some bad news.

My mother didn't want surgery. She asked: isn't there a way to treat it conservatively?

Dr. Mao answered bluntly: no surgery means giving up on treatment.

He said that in treating gliomas, surgery is the most standard and most effective option. Radiation, chemo, and everything else are only supporting treatments.

He was right. I'd already seen all this in my chats with GPT. Right now, surgery really is the only and most effective treatment for glioma: removing as much tumor tissue as possible without causing new nerve damage.

But it wasn't that simple.

Typical grade 2 gliomas usually have just one lesion. In that case, a complete removal followed by radiation and chemo can almost amount to a recovery.

My mother isn't that "lucky." There are now four lesions in her brain, and two of them sit deep in the thalamus, a place no scalpel can possibly touch.

More importantly, what my mother has is a "diffuse glioma." Diffuse means the tumor has no clear border. It grows by infiltrating. Trying to remove it completely is like dropping ink into clear water and asking someone to take the drop back out.

In other words, even with surgery, this tumor can't be fully removed, which means it will keep growing.

After reviewing my mother's scans and her earlier diagnoses, Dr. Mao concluded that her glioma definitely can't be classified as grade 2 anymore. Even if it isn't the highest, grade 4, it's at least grade 3. I still wasn't surprised.

Because before going to see Dr. Mao Qing, I'd had an in-depth conversation with ChatGPT. I told it everything I knew about my mother's condition over the past two years, and in that conversation it told me her current condition was most likely not grade 2. It strongly recommended I take her to the hospital to have the tumor regraded. And then, sure enough, Dr. Mao Qing reached the same conclusion as GPT. Two days later I took my mother back to see Dr. Liao Xiaoling, and this time Dr. Liao also said with confidence that my mother is now most likely grade 4.

Well. Okay.

So that's how it is. What else can we do?

Surgery.

Dr. Liao Xiaoling was different from Dr. Mao Qing. He explained to us in detail which part of my mother's brain could be removed, what removing it could do, and what the risks were.

But like Dr. Mao, he also just asked us to think it over and get in touch if we wanted to go ahead with surgery.

Yes. Suddenly, whether to operate became the family's hard choice.

But the crux of that choice wasn't really whether to operate. It was a question bound up with quality of life.

Because we all know diffuse glioma can't be cured. To this day, the recurrence rate for glioma anywhere in the world is 100%, and every treatment, surgery included, only aims to extend life and improve its quality.

In other words, even if we choose surgery now, if the prognosis is good, how much longer she'd live is still unknown. And if the prognosis is bad, surgery plus the radiation and chemo after it might even shorten her life and lower the quality of life she has now.

On the other hand, I also have to consider my mother's wishes. She understands her illness very clearly. She knows it's a problem the whole world hasn't solved, with no chance of a cure, and that with four lesions in her brain, a complete removal can't bring a good outcome either.

So what I can do is tell her the truth. Tell her what surgery could bring, and what risks it carries too. As for whether to operate, the choice still has to be hers.

Without surgery, in Dr. Mao Qing's words, we'd be choosing to give up on treatment.

But GPT told me that skipping surgery doesn't mean giving up on treatment. It means treating the symptoms, so that my mother can reach the end with as good a quality of life as possible.

By the time we'd thought it through this far, everyone already knew in their hearts.

The die was cast.

It suddenly hit me that even if I were very rich right now, I still couldn't save my mother.

I don't think there's anything in the world more hopeless and helpless than this.

If this were an illness money could cure, I'd spend every last thing I have.

But fate plays tricks. My mother has run into a problem the Creator set for all of humanity, one we haven't solved yet. And my mother may be destined to become a speck of dust in her time.

All at once I understood a lot of things I never had before.

What it means to want to so badly and be powerless.

What it means that money can buy a clock but not time.

What it means that "the world is one great dream, and how many autumns cool a life."

What it means that "the spring red of the forest blossoms has faded, far too soon. Nothing to be done: cold rain in the morning, wind at night. Rouge-stained tears, a plea to stay and drink. When will we meet again? Life is forever full of regret, as water forever flows east."

In the past, walking through county towns all over, I'd see clusters of old people gathered together and feel afraid. I was afraid that someday I'd become an old person with no life in me too, and then die. I was afraid of a life like that.

But now, as I walk out of the hospital doors and think back on those old people sitting in the sun on street corners, I feel an endless envy.

They're old, and maybe they carry all sorts of aches and ailments. But what does that matter?

They can still sit in the sun. They can still breathe. They can still walk slowly through one dusk after another.

So it turns out that in this vast, indifferent world, simply being alive is already life's greatest gift.