Nine top doctors shared their experiences in fighting their own illnesses at a book-launching press conference at National Taiwan Uni-versity Hospital yesterday.
How Top Doctors Fight Their Own Illnesses (
The book, published earlier this month, was written by two senior medical reporters.
"What is it like when doctors become ill? How do doctors struggle with their own illnesses? How do they restart their lives after their diseases?" said Chen Ching-fang (
"These are issues many people are concerned about. However, we almost gave up our plan to write the book because most doctors we contacted refused to talk about their own illnesses," Chen said.
"Doctors make the worst patients," said Lin Hsin-nan (
Lin was 51 when he lost sight in his right eye in 1990. The retina had become detached and three surgeries failed to correct the problem.
"What I worried most was not the loss of my eyesight. What I dreaded most was that I might lose my confidence," Lin said.
"I might become physically blind, but my mind cannot become blind, too," he said, adding that he often bumps into people or objects due to his partial vision.
Liaw Yuang-shuang (廖永祥), another NTU physician, discovered he had liver cancer when he gave himself an ultrasound exam three years ago. He was 38 years old and had just completed his doctorate.
"I found a 10cm tumor in my liver," Liaw said. "Within 48 hours I had my first cancer surgery."
"However, two more tumors grew in my liver 120 days after the operation. My liver was only one-third of its original size at that time. I was facing the worst possible situation for a liver cancer patient," he recalled.
Liaw said his recovery was entirely due to God's mercy.
"I no longer take life for granted. I give all glory to God," he said.
Oliver Tseng (
"I began my language therapy at the age of 31 to correct my pronunciation. For a whole year, I practiced hard in order to speak clearly," Tseng said.
After numerous plastic surgeries, Tseng has a smooth face now.
"I have great sympathy for my patients because I deeply understand the feelings of people who have deformed faces," Tseng said.
Shieh Shung-yau (
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching