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REPORT ON MRS A. J. MATIN
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After a false start from Chungking on the 13th of November, the plane did not leave, we finally got off on the 14th and arriving in Hongkong without delay stayed at the Peninsular Hotel over night. The following day being Saturday, and the usual week end holiday in Force at the Queen ary Hospital, my husband registered at the Hospital but was allowed to go on to the Repulse Bay Hotel where he spent the day, went to a dinner party with friends, and returned late to the Queen Mary Hospital.
On Tuesday, routine X-rays and tests were begun. From then on my husband was under observation, his condition declining to such a point that it was decided to perform an exploratory operation on the 5th of December. I was assured that X-rays and the history of the case precluded the theory of cancer, as the course of a cancer is usually from three to six months. y husband had been in poor health for fiteen months, and the accident which was apparently the beginning of the trouble had happened three and a half years before, in London.
A few days before the operation was performed, about the 28th of November, I received a letter from Dr. H. . Loucks, the head surgeon of the Peking Union Medical College, in Peking, who had examined my husband in May, 1940, before he went to Chungking, strongly advising us not to remain in Hongkong, but to go straight through to New York and to place the case in the hands of Dr. Whipple, as he suspected that my husband was developing a slow growing tumor, and
T.Loucks would need the most expert surgical advice and treatment. had been following the case with keen interest during the time my husband was in 'Chungking and had shown signs offailing health. had kept him fully advised by airmail.
EXY
The results of the opération confirmed his diagnosis, and Professor Digby found a small growth of fibroid tissue, quite sufficient to cause the loss in physical condition which my husband had suffered. He cut a number of adhesions which were causing trouble, but decided not to remove the tumor as the loss of blood would be too great for a patient in my husband's debilitated
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condition. He felt that it could be broken down by deep X-ray, and told me that he had operated on a patient ten years ago who had had He and the a far worse tumor and who had recovered with treatment. other doctors who had attaneded the operation seemed not too pessimistic, and said that with adequate treatment my husband had a chance for recovery.
Two days after the operation my husband eat up in bed and wrote to the Ambassador saying that he was getting on well. Ten days later he was up and walking about the room, and two weeks later he was strong enough to go visiting other patients. Professor Digby said he was making a most remarkable recovery from the operation and was very hopef 1 for him. And this recovery was being made despite the war which had descended upon us on the 8th of December, a Monday. The cutting of the adhesions was perhaps accountable for this, relieving pressure somewhere. For a week or more after the outbreak of war food conditione remained almost normal, although the incessant bombing of Mount Davis, a large fort just about five hundred yards down the road from the Queen Mary, together with the replies from numerous pompoms and other types of guns placed Immediately beside the hospital grounds, become a very græt strain. Having had considerable experience of bombing during our eighteen months in Chungking, we took it all more quietly, had less nervous reaction, than most people in the horpital, which for the first week or two was not overcrowded. ir rthur Blackburn however could not stand it. He had the corner room at the end of the wing, and ahells sounded, in passing, as though they were within fifty to A hundred feet of his verandah. They were coming from a Japanese naval ship the other side of the islands, and were of large caliber, so it was said. He decided to leave the Hospital and join Lady Blackburn on the Feak. The latter had just had a severe operation for a ruptured appendix and was recuperating at the War Memorial Hospital. She was moved to the Feak Mansions when the Hospital became crowded, but later they both returned to the Hoepital when conditions on the Peek became ungafe for them to remain alone in their flat. They were subjected to even more severe shelling on the Peak than at the ucen Mary, which the Japanese were anxious to preserve for their own use as a hospital.
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