Timeless Moments

【Timeless Moments】

Hospitals are pagodas where lives are saved and love accumulates,
as well as stages where people meet and part,
births and deaths loop,
twenty-four-seven non-stop.

Every moment a heart-warming tale.
When the shutter releases, through the mind’s eye,
the moment when lives interweave are captured,
and the profound emotional experience remembered.

E-Mail：btcmf@tzuchi.com.tw
Buddhist Tzu Chi Medical Foundation：http://www.tzuchi.com.tw/

Treasure

Lee Ping-Jui, a fifth-year medical student of Tzu Chi University at the time, bought his first DSLR ever due to the influences of his seniors two and half years ago. He fell in love with photography ever since. With “preserving precious memories in photos” in mind, Li began to document the daily int...

Theme Party

The ability to “breathe” comes innate with all human lives, but for the patients at the Hualien Tzu Chi Medical Center, the simple act of breathing is a luxury. The Respiratory Care Center (RCC) of the Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital was established in March of 2009. Despite being a relatively new addition...

Is it You Looking at Me?

I am grateful to my instructor Shao-Yin Chu for giving me this rare opportunity. Since we seldom come in contact with the Down’s patients, my previous impression of them was strictly from the rigid descriptions in the textbooks, and perhaps some aged photos. Can you imagine Down’s babies painting, d...

A Taste of Youth

Ya-Ting was diagnosed with bone cancer at age 13. She passed away at age 19 in the spring of 2010. Knowing her for six years, we have realized the limitation of medicine. Yet, her brilliant smiles and grace encourage the medical team to move forward, and walk the last mile with every patient. It onl...

Days After Earthquake, Pakistan

In year of 2005, I joined the Tzu Chi TIMA and arrived in Pakistan after a devastating earthquake. However, people there made me felt it was like in heaven; their plain characters and innocent eyes were unforgettable to me. The whole TIMA team developed close relationship with local victims. It also...

Father and Son

In good weather, Hualien’s sky is very clear. Looking out from the dormitory, you can see the ocean directly. Simply from one angle, I would experiment shots with different cameras, apertures, and shutter speeds. For a long time, my life is circling around Tzu Chi University and Tzu Chi Hospital, an...

Her Hand

Xiao-Ting (a fictitious name) is a girl who repeatedly bites her pinkie. It is heart wrenching to watch her self-mutilating behavior as a result of the rare genetic disorder CdLS (Cornelia de Lange Syndrome). Years ago, I performed the Full Mouth Rehabilitation on her under general anesthesia. I cap...

One special friend

In medical school, many of our instructors told us that a physician’s career was no longer a smooth path. With the deterioration of the doctor-patient relationship, everything a doctor does is often placed under heavy scrutiny. A hospital is an emotional crossroad of everyday life stories as the liv...

Eyes

His gaze swept across the laminated floor an inch ahead of my toe, and drifted out the glass window, without hesitation. Perhaps to mountains afar, resting like a kestrel against the headwind. Looking back, he twisted his neck to glace the top of infectious waste bin, and, before it was in focus, d...

The Path of Bodhisattva - In Memory of...

On the connecting walkway from the operating room to the outpatient clinic, I saw an elderly volunteer, walking with a crutch, towards the light at the end of the walkway, slowly and silently. The scene reminded me of all the elderly volunteers I have witnessed cross the walkway. As I reached the so...

No Regrets

There is a love, exist between two persons. It’s power, enormous and shapeless, can bring a person to unhesitatingly, allow stomach be opened, only to save the life of another, a complete stranger. There is a love, exist between two persons. It’s superior surgical skills, precise anesthesia, tender...

My Belief in Poetic Anethesia

When I tried to climb BeeLu Mountain on an early freezing day in 2011, I came across a small muntjac deer that had fallen on the roadside approximately two miles into the wooded trail. The little animal was in a coma with no pulse, no breath, and low body temperature. It appeared to me that it had b...

Stand by you

Plastic surgery is a career that seems to be synonymous with cosmetic surgery in the present day, but is that true? I was in medical school for seven years, but it was not until I stood at the operating table that I learned what a retractor is, and another six years in residency before I knew what p...

Under the Dust

On the weekend eve of June 27th, 2015, the dust explosion at Formosa Fun Coast, New Taipei City, shocked the world. Over 500 patients hospitalized, major hospitals in the northern districts overwhelmed, It was the worst burn accident in Taiwan’s medical history. Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital initiated mas...

My heart in Kathmandu

The home of Buddha, NAMASTE. A walk to the medical station in the old city, the air smells a faint odor. Fallen walls, as far as eyes can see, collapsed houses, old faces dulled. Cars honking incessantly, amidst the relief personnel the tourists’ shutters fire away, echoing in the old streets, so su...

The Ferryman

Jesus pointed to his heart, entangled in thorns, signifying his devotion of endless love. He was ready for the crucifixion. An eighty-year-old surgeon Lin Sen-Chia at Yuli Tzu Chi Hospital, leads a team every Thursday afternoon to visit patients. When patients live in remoted areas, they have to tr...