The normal weight of a human liver is usually only about two pounds, but at the moment when Liu Di's abdominal cavity was opened, the lead surgeon Dong Jiahong was faced with a gigantic liver weighing four pounds.
The extra two pounds were all weight, but not flesh; they were densely packed, invisible to the naked eye yet truly existing—worms.
In 2019, at Tsinghua Changgung Hospital in Beijing, Liu Di was a girl from the Tibetan region who had just taken the college entrance examination. For children born in the Tibetan region, education is the toughest way to change their fate, and Liu Di devoted all her energy to her senior year.
Her body had already issued warning signals: starting from the previous year, she frequently felt short of breath and had vomiting and diarrhea, but the obsession with "the college entrance examination is paramount" became the best cover for her illness. She simplistically attributed these severe physical discomforts to excessive stress and gastrointestinal issues, stubbornly holding on until the exams were over.
When she faced the real question of "should I go to the hospital," her body no longer allowed her to choose. At that time, Liu Di's skin showed a strange yellowish-brown color, and even in her clearly defined eyeballs, the whites were completely stained yellow.
Walking, a daily action, had become a luxury for her; she had to hang on her father like a puppet to move a few steps. After going through multiple hospitals with no results, that year, her family brought her, who was left with only half a life, to Dong Jiahong.
Dong Jiahong is not only a renowned liver and gallbladder expert but also an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and the director of this hospital. With countless experiences, his eyes quickly made a rough judgment upon seeing Liu Di's earthy yellow skin and eyeballs: this is severe jaundice caused by extreme bile accumulation.
This jaundice is by no means an ordinary minor ailment; a liver CT scan quickly confirmed Dr. Dong's prediction, but it also made the medical team, accustomed to big scenes, gasp in shock. On the scan, the girl's liver had doubled in size, and the originally uniformly textured organ image was now filled with large, disturbing shadows.
That was not a tumor; it was a "worm's nest." Dong Jiahong gravely threw a term at Liu Di's parents that sounded more terrifying than cancer—worm cancer.
In medical terms, this is called echinococcosis, scientifically known as hydatid disease. This highly camouflaged parasite is a master of survival in nature, extremely resilient.
They usually lurk in food or water sources, sliding into the human body through the mouth. At first, they only lie dormant in the intestines, then seize the opportunity to break through the intestinal wall and invade the blood vessels, following the blood circulation to find the most fertile "settlement point." For them, a nutrient-rich liver is the "top-notch mansion."
If detected early, a few antibiotics can end this invasion. Unfortunately, this disease can be termed a "silent killer"; during the long incubation period, there is almost no pain, and it is not until the worms have gnawed the liver into a hollow ruin and drained the body's nutrition that the grotesque symptoms emerge. By that time, Liu Di was evidently in the late stage, with her entire liver nearly ruined.
The paths left for Liu Di's family were only two. The first path is a whole liver transplant, simply put, "replace it with a new one"; cut out the old liver and implant a healthy one.
Although this could root out the problem, let alone the high surgical costs that had long exceeded the family's limits, lifelong use of anti-rejection drugs would still carry uncontrollable risks.
The second path is an ex vivo liver resection surgery. As early as 2009, Dong Jiahong began exploring this tactic: completely "disassembling" the damaged liver from the human body and conducting detailed "mine clearance" and repair outside the body, keeping the good tissue while removing the bad tissue and worms, and finally "installing" the repaired liver back into the body.
To preserve the already meager family finances and out of absolute trust in Dong Jiahong's team's decade-long honed skills, Liu Di's parents trembled as they signed the surgical consent form. It was a long, suffocating surgery that lasted a full 14 hours.
When the abdominal cavity was opened and the liver, badly corroded by parasites, was exposed under the surgical lamp, the visual impact was horrifying. Because it was occupied by parasites, the entire liver appeared a dull grayish-white, as if it had lost all vitality, weighing four pounds, meaning that besides the two pounds of liver tissue that should have been there, the other two pounds were all cysts of the crazily proliferating echinococci.
Dong Jiahong focused and composed himself; this resembled a precise sculpture under a microscope. After the liver was removed, it was first soaked in a special insecticide solution for a full 4 hours to prevent any eggs from being missed or transferred during the removal process.
Next came the doctor's "darkest moment"—manual debridement. Dong Jiahong had to use his eyes and instruments in concert, meticulously removing those eggs and pathological lesions that were not only hard to discern with the naked eye but had long been intertwined with the liver tissue.
This work lasted nearly 6 hours, with every cut needing to be precise to the millimeter because every gram of healthy liver tissue was the girl's rebirth capital. Following that was another 2 hours of necrotic tissue removal; the once plump liver became riddled with holes, but what remained was hope.
After the external repair was completed, Dong Jiahong performed vascular reconstruction and duct patency on the remaining healthy liver before steadily implanting it back into Liu Di's abdominal cavity.
As the blood vessels were connected and blood flowed back, the originally pale liver gradually regained its rosy color. At that moment, the red light outside the operating room finally turned green after a long anxious wait.
The resilience of life was vividly displayed at that moment. 24 hours after the surgery, Liu Di opened her eyes in the intensive care unit; after 36 hours, she was transferred to a regular ward. A week later, the girl who once needed her father to carry her to walk could already get out of bed by herself. Just a month later, she was completely recovered, entering her dream university campus with her reborn body.
