Wen | Cai Tu Shuo

Editor | Cai Tu Shuo

He is the vice president of JD.COM with a net worth of over 1 million yuan, the president of the Internet Finance and Taxation Alliance, the "first person in China's electronic invoice", and a visiting professor invited by top universities.

judging by all the standards of success, he is a person who can master the right to speak in the present society.

in the first 43 years, as the winner of life, he stood in front of the dazzling spotlight and was worshipped by the audience.

But at the age of 43, everything changed dramatically. The winner of life became a terminally ill patient. From the involuntary trembling of the body to the doctor's diagnosis, the king of business has long been a thing of the past, and the rest is just a patient waiting for him to wither gradually.

The countdown to his life began in this year.

after the glory, in addition to despair and desolation, there is also a heart full of unwillingness.

after several flips, he turned his heart into motivation and decided to find a chance for himself-to develop new drugs for treating ALS.

in this way, he took up the familiar internet as a weapon, used all the resources he could, broke down the research and development barriers, searched for top experts, and established hundreds of millions of fund pools. Find a way out for yourself and hundreds of thousands of patients.

He is our hero today, Cai Lei, the warrior who fought against gradual freezing.

Cai Lei was born in a small county town in Shangqiu, Henan Province in 1978. His father was a veteran and he was very strict with him since he was a child. Under this strict discipline, Cai Lei's academic performance is very good, and he can get the first place in every exam, so some students call him an "alien", because only aliens are so smart.

What they don't know is that excellent academic performance is the only thing that Cai Lei can get.

In the memory of Cai Leier's childhood, his family was always poor. He wore patched clothes when he was in junior high school, and the toys he played with when he was a child were also unwanted by his neighbor's children. It seems that nothing in life can make him happy except studying.

After entering senior high school, he spent two years learning all the knowledge of senior high school, took the college entrance examination in senior two, and was successfully admitted to the Central University of Finance and Economics.

At that time, Cai Lei only hoped that it could hurry up and get rid of the poverty that overwhelmed him.

Having tasted the misery of a poor family, after graduating from college, Cai Lei devoted himself to the society all the time. In order not to suffer from money, he could eat anything.

First, she entered an office, but her meager income was rejected by her girlfriend. For the sake of love, Cai Lei gave up her iron rice bowl and moved to a foreign company. She got a high salary and lost all her time.

Like a tireless workaholic, his eyes are full of work. Because of this, his career is getting smoother and smoother. First, he became the tax manager of Samsung Group's headquarters in China in 23, and then he moved to other companies as the tax manager and the chief tax agent of the group.

For everyone saying that he is a "workaholic", he specially sent Weibo to explain:

In 211, sensing that the Internet would become the trend of the times, Cai Lei made a decision that everyone could not understand, and left Vanke to go to JD.COM for development.

at that time, Vanke's annual revenue could reach 12 billion yuan, while JD.COM was just a small company. If it seems to us now that Cai Lei's decision is undoubtedly far-sighted, at that time, there were very few people who could have such courage.

with the rise of the e-commerce era, JD.COM has also become a leader in domestic e-commerce platforms by virtue of the east wind. Cai Lei, by virtue of his many years of business experience, has successfully doubled the income of JD.COM.

In the following ten years, with the rise of JD.COM, Cai Lei had a series of enviable titles:

"The First Electronic Invoice Person in China", "The Top Ten Financial and Tax Person of the Year" and "The Contributor to China's Reform" in 218. At the same time, he also served as an off-campus tutor of Peking University, Tsinghua and Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and he was promoted to the vice president of JD.COM Group with years of efforts.

At the same time, Cai Lei met the other half of his life.

He met his wife through blind date. Her wife is 11 years younger than him, and she is a master of Peking University Medical College.

When they met for the second time, Cai Lei proposed to his wife. He said that he didn't have time to fall in love, so he could just get married if he felt fit.

At first, his wife thought that Cai Lei was a liar, and no man would propose at the second meeting.

But with contact, my wife gradually discovered that this boring man was even more boring than herself.

And two boring people have very similar three views. They both think that food and travel are extravagant and a waste of time. They hate internal friction, both for themselves and their partners.

and they all think that marriage is a responsibility that must be fulfilled in life besides congeniality.

In this way, they got married not long after they met each other, and soon they had the crystallization of their love.

At this time, Cai Lei has a new life goal, and she is more dedicated and hardworking in her career.

It seems that after having a family, a lover and children, people have changed from duckweed wandering around to a big tree with roots deeply rooted in the ground.

Cai Lei, who is full of energy, led the team to triumph all the way, and his performance doubled again.

However, just when everything seems to be moving in the best direction, the nightmare comes to him quietly.

As usual, Cai Lei is dealing with official business in the office. Suddenly, he feels the muscles on his left arm beating wildly. To be precise, it should be muscle tachycardia. He thought it was because he was too tired. After a short rest, he recovered.

Because of his busy work, Cai Lei didn't take it seriously. In addition to being responsible for the group's financial work, Cai Lei also took four startup companies at that time. When he was busy, he couldn't spare time to eat, so he didn't have time to go to the hospital.

It just dragged on for half a year. As the situation didn't improve, at the beginning of the second year, Cai Lei decided to go to the hospital.

First, he went to the Union Medical College Hospital. Liu Mingsheng, the chief physician of neurology department, looked at the results of his electromyography, but only said that his illness was not very good. If he could be hospitalized, he would better stay for a while, but he didn't know exactly what it was.

Cai Lei told the doctor that he didn't have time to be hospitalized at present, and hoped that the doctor could prescribe some medicine for him and take it home.

But Liu Mingsheng didn't prescribe medicine for him, but asked him to take some B vitamins.

Cai Lei was glad to hear that the doctor said he didn't need to take medicine. He just took vitamins, which shouldn't be a big problem. It was not until after the diagnosis that Cai Lei realized that when muscle tachycardia appeared in his body, it meant that the muscles were shrinking and the motor neurons were seriously apoptotic.

This is the symptom of onset of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), commonly known as "gradual freezing", which ranks first among the five terminal diseases in the world (gradual freezing, cancer, AIDS, leukemia and rheumatoid). At present, there is no clear biomarker for detection, so the misdiagnosis rate is extremely high.

unless doctors have enough experience, they will not give patients a diagnosis easily.

Although the doctors in Union Medical College Hospital didn't say the specific symptoms, Cai Lei's symptoms didn't relieve at all, so he had to go to other hospitals for examination. He went to several hospitals for treatment until he met Fan Dongsheng and was hospitalized for a series of complete disease screening, excluding all other symptoms, and finally got the most exact and desperate conclusion.

Fan Dongsheng told him that ALS equals no medicine to cure.

in the face of such a rare and unknown disease, because the cause is unknown, even the direction of treatment can't be found, so what about medication?

Up to now, patients with this disease have no precedent of being cured, and most patients will reach the end of their lives within 3-5 years after being diagnosed.

The process is also extremely cruel. The sick patient will not die directly, but when all the motor neurons die, the cardiopulmonary function will not be supported, so it is necessary to cut the trachea and connect the ventilator. Unable to speak and eat independently, they can only rely on nasal feeding or gastrostomy to "eat".

I watched all the muscles atrophy gradually, and my limbs lost consciousness. At last, like a vegetative person, I lay in bed and continued my life by infusion until I could no longer support myself.

a patient described it as "watching yourself wither day by day and being powerless" after getting the disease.

The most famous "frozen man" in the world is the contemporary physicist Hawking. After being diagnosed at the age of 21, he has been struggling with the disease. Even though he was almost paralyzed after several years of illness, his language ability gradually lost. He was still able to communicate with others with the help of computers and language synthesizers, and completed the masterpiece A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to the Black Hole and the "Zero Gravity" flight experience.

Even in the later stage, with the erosion of the disease, the whole body can only communicate with the outside world by turning its eyes, and they still live tenaciously for 55 years. You know, this is a miracle in the ALS world. Because there is no cure for ALS, the survival time of patients after illness is only 2-5 years.

At present, the only drug for ALS patients is a specific drug called "Lirutai", which needs to be taken continuously for 18 months and can delay the life for more than two months. The drug price is about 4, yuan, which is also a huge expense for ordinary families.

After the diagnosis, Cai Lei began a long examination and treatment. Lying in the hospital bed, he thought of his father, who had few words in his memory and was very serious. Because of liver cirrhosis, he left him early.

When he was a junior, his mother took his father to Beijing to see a doctor. During his stay in hospital, he often asked for leave to take care of him. At that time, his father's illness was very serious. Under the torture of his illness, his father became thinner and his temper became more and more violent. Sometimes he shouted and sometimes he cried silently, and he died soon.

He thought about his father and himself. He only entered middle age, and his life was coming to an end. Suddenly, all kinds of emotions came in, mixed with pain, unwillingness and despair. For half a year, he didn't sleep a solid sleep, and he woke up three or four times every night to think about his illness and guess how long he could live.

He thought he was desperate, just like when he was competing with his competitors, he told them:

"As long as I started in Cai Lei, you couldn't do anything. Because I don't want to die, you die, and you lose. "

Now that his opponent is ALS, he suddenly finds that he has lost his high spirits, and he desperately wants it.

Sometimes, standing by the window and seeing a tramp picking up garbage downstairs, he will think of himself enviously. Although the other person has no fixed place and is in rags, he can at least live healthily and at least run and jump.

but yourself? Aside from the so-called success and wealth, what else do you have?

I have lived on the rampage for most of my life before I know that health is the most important thing.

this is how many people will feel after losing their health.

In desperation, he even told his wife that he was divorced.

the wife understands that this man who has been in high spirits for half his life is afraid. He is afraid that he will become a drag on himself, and he is also afraid that he will leave him. When his wife cried, she told Cai Lei, "Don't even think about it!"

In order to regain his health, this man, who has claimed to be an intellectual for half his life, began to accept superstitions and visit fortune tellers, hoping to get psychological comfort.

The fortune teller told him that LMNT was short of water, so he changed his name to Cai Runqian.

Later, I invited a master of geomantic omen to watch the geomantic omen at home, visited the master of acupuncturing in Songshan Shaolin Temple and did meridian massage every day.

He tried everything that others said was useful, and even had a high fever of 39 degrees because of injecting expensive imported drugs.

This stopped him from tossing, because he found that such tossing would only make the situation worse.

From the initial unacceptable, to the later struggles, when the ups and downs gradually calmed down, Cai Lei looked at his wife who came to the ward every day, and he didn't know that his father was leaving his son, so he was desperate.

if he is alone, maybe one day in the future, he will end his life without the help of the disease.

But now he is not the duckweed he used to be, so how can he leave his wife and children to live alone in the world?

Relatives and lovers are both armor and weakness. At that moment, Cai Lei was extremely awake. He should pull himself together and take out the attitude that he had been obsessed with his work and his illness to the end.

Cai Lei told his wife that he wanted to find a new medicine to cure the gradual freezing.

even the wife who works in this field certainly knows that this is a fantasy at the moment, but if he can cheer up, why not?

With the support of his wife, Cai Lei took action. First, he found thousands of English papers from academic websites all over the world to find out at what stage ALS has been studied.

Cai Lei, with strong execution, began to make a series of plans for the disease. First, it set up a medical technology company-Beijing Eskang Medical Technology Co., Ltd., which specializes in overcoming gradual freezing.

Then, the information barrier of bankrupt traditional medical care was broken, and a patient research database was established to collect information about patients with gradual freezing.

For this reason, he specially contacted some caring organizations for frostbite, and invited Fan Dongsheng, a neuron expert, to set up an information aggregation platform of "Healing and Mutual Help House".

Looking at Cai Lei rushing about for a hopeless thing like this, someone asked him, Brain, an institution that has been studying gradual freezing for more than ten years, has not achieved any results. How can you get confidence to pass?