An 87-year-old old man with dementia last week graduated from university and plans to continue studying for a graduate degree.
He completed 136 credits in four years, along with his bachelor’s thesis.
Lin Tien-fa (林添發) from Chiayi County started to develop symptoms of dementia 17 years ago.
Photo: Lin I-chang, Taipei Times
Lin fell asleep while driving, failed to find his way home, forgot his home telephone number and was later diagnosed with dementia, together with an intelligence quotient (IQ) equivalent to a seven-year-old.
In 2004, Lin was given a permanently effective “catastrophic illness card” because of his condition.
However, Lin did not succumb to the disease. He has set up a Hondao Senior Citizens’ Welfare Foundation’s volunteer station in Chiayi’s Dalin Township (大林) and taught Japanese. As a result, his symptoms have subsided.
Despite having only a vocational high school diploma, Lin started studying four years ago and was later admitted to the continuing education program at Nanhua University’s Department of Philosophy and Life Education.
At first, Lin needed his son and daughter-in-law’s help to commute to class and to take notes.
Now, Lin can cope independently and has even been honored with a prize for his class notes.
One of Lin’s classmate said that the school did not treat Lin leniently because of his condition.
“Lin always sat in the front row, never dozed in class and raised questions a lot,” the classmate said. “He has been more enthusiastic and serious about studying than most of his classmates.”
His classmate added that Lin was particularly strong in the Taoist philosophy of Zhuangzi (莊子). Lin’s bachelor’s thesis was based on the social value of the volunteer station he established and at which he works.
According to Hsu Hung-chieh (徐鴻傑), a physician in the department of psychosomatic medicine at Dalin Tzu Chi Hospital, dementia can be irreversible, in which it is a degenerative or vascular dementia.
Dementia can be reversible if it is caused by anemia, malnutrition or metabolic diseases, which can be treated.
Hsu said that Lin’s case might fall into this category.
However, another physician practicing in Chiayi, Wang Chia-ling (王家麟), said he believes Lin was misdiagnosed from the outset.
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