What can a person handicapped by cancer do?
Lin Mu-ching (林睦卿) often gets asked thate question when she visits cancer patients in hospital.
“You can do whatever a healthy person can do,” she patiently answers.
PHOTO: CNA
These are not empty words of encouragement. Lin means what she says and through her own life has proven her belief to be true.
The 32-year-old from Taipei has become a motivator for thousands of cancer patients since the Formosa Cancer Foundation, moved by her strong sense of optimism and ability to overcome her difficulties, invited her to be their quasi-ambassador, sponsoring her to make speeches at hospitals, schools and elsewhere.
In order to share her story with more people, the cancer foundation hired two directors to shoot a film featuring her triumph over her disease and handicaps.
To the delight of the foundation, the film shot by a crew of four in four months was one of the five finalists out of 250 films in the category “Personal Stories” at the International Cancer Film Festival organized by the International Union Against Cancer in Geneva, Switzerland, in August.
Through the film, the foundation hopes Lin’s story will inspire more cancer sufferers and disadvantaged people to not lose hope and to pursue their dreams.
Lin was an ordinary girl who aspired to be an actress. She was looking forward to studying at art school and was to eager to take up a career as a performance artist.
But her dream was dashed at the age of 16 when, while playing basketball at school, she bumped into another player and fell. She felt pain in her left knee that worsened over the next few days.
Her father took her to see many doctors and finally discovered that she had osteosarcoma, a rare bone cancer that largely affects children.
The only treatment was to amputate her left leg and even with this aggressive surgery her chances of surviving for another five years were only 20 percent.
Her father told her the proposed surgery and the dim prognosis just before she was carried into the operating theater.
When she regained consciousness, Lin no longer felt the pain that had plagued her. She used her right leg to try and touch her left leg, but found it was no longer there. All that remained was a 12.5cm stump. She broke down in tears.
For a long period after being released from hospital Lin was gripped with a strong feeling of self-pity and anger that this terrible disease had happened to her when she had done nothing wrong.
She could no longer walk or run, let alone pursue her dream of becoming an actress.
The operation interrupted her studies at school and made it difficult for her to find a job. Her father worried that his daughter might have to eke out a miserable living working as a fortuneteller.
Suffering from depression, Lin eventually found work as a telephone operator and led an unhappy life until one day she realized nobody was going to give her an opportunity to change her life unless she pursued opportunity herself.
She went back to the hobbies she had before her surgery, such as swimming, hiking and dancing, and learned to ignore the strange looks of others.
Lin even completed a course to become a television host and got a job with the Public Television Service.
It was then that her active pursuit of her goals in defiance of the dim prognosis she had received came to the attention of the Formosa Cancer Foundation, which encouraged her to share her experiences in fighting cancer with others.
Her speeches have since helped many to appreciate what they have, rather than regret what they have lost, and the most touching part of her speech is when she dances.
Her dance teacher made her sit on a stool or on the floor and use mainly her hands and arms to express the rhythm and motif of the dance.
At the film’s Taipei premiere on Dec. 16, Formosa Cancer Foundation vice president Jacqueline Whang Peng (彭汪嘉康) lauded Lin’s courage, which has helped her to survive 16 years after the surgery, against all the odds.
Lin told the audience that she somehow appreciates her loss of a limb, because it brought out the best in her and the most colorful part of her life began after the operation.
She has named the film A Gift: 12.5cm and many of the audience, after watching the film, agreed with her.
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
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
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