"It feels so wonderful to save someone's life!" This is one thing all marrow donors agree upon. The complete live coverage of a journey to transport bone marrow from Taiwan to mainland China allows us to realize that a life saved is the most noble thing.

On June 13, five television stations from Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China joined hands to provide complete live coverage of an activity entitled, "Relay with Love and Save a Life." These five TV stations were: Tzu Chi TV and ET TV from Taiwan, Phoenix Satellite TV from Hong Kong, and Jiangsu Satellite TV and Suzhou Cable TV from mainland China.

What sort of activity would bring these five stations together? It was the extraction and shipment of bone marrow from a 26-year-old man in Taiwan to save the life of a 21-year-old woman who was suffering from acute leukemia in Suzhou, China.

This was the eighty-sixth case of a person in Taiwan donating marrow to save a blood disease patient in mainland China. For the past three years, patients in China have been very successful in finding matching bone marrow through the Tzu Chi Bone Marrow Donor Registry. Since the beginning of this year, an average of one match a week has been made, and sometimes two or three matches in one week.

Whenever bone marrow is sent from Taiwan to China, the news media in China always cover the story very closely. In addition to expressing their appreciation to the Taiwanese people, they also want to promote marrow donation in China. Following the Tzu Chi model, China may also build a very rich marrow donor data bank from its population of over a billion.

Tzu Chi did not arrange for the complete live broadcast. As it was the first non-relative bone marrow transplant in Suzhou, China, it received much attention from the local media. Phoenix Satellite TV from Hong Kong and the two local stations in China wanted to make a thorough report on this case so that more Chinese people would be able to realize the value of saving lives and might decide to become bone marrow donors as well. As a result, we joined hands with them to provide twenty hours of live coverage of this event across the Taiwan Straits.

A fight against time

Medical science is very advanced these days, but a bone marrow transplant is still the only hope for patients suffering from blood diseases.

Bone marrow donors put love into action like bodhisattvas in the human world, so we should praise them and be grateful to them. However, bone marrow recipients are not saved simply because someone donates his or her bone marrow. There is also a need for cooperation from a group of loving, patient volunteers who help deliver the bone marrow, and also from the medical teams who work against the clock to save life by extracting and transplanting bone marrow and taking care of the marrow recipients.

A bone marrow transplant is a race against time. Normally the route taken to transport bone marrow from Taiwan to China begins in Hualien. From there it is flown to the domestic Sungshan Airport in Taipei, and then to the Chiang Kai-shek International Airport in Taoyuan. The next plane touches down in Hong Kong and the volunteers carrying the marrow transfer to another plane to China. Tzu Chi volunteers pay for their own transportation costs. The route is very long and they also have to take time into consideration--there can be no delay since the bone marrow must be injected into the patient's body within twenty-four hours after the extraction. Patients must undergo radiation treatments to kill their own diseased bone marrow and then wait for the new bone marrow to arrive. If the marrow isn't delivered on time, the patient simply dies and we miss the chance to save a life.

Nevertheless, no problems will occur as long as there is love in the heart. There have been times when bad weather, plane delays or traffic jams on the highway have threatened the whole process, but they were overcome.

The bag of marrow that this young Taiwanese man donated on June 13 took the volunteers fifteen hours to deliver. It finally arrived at the Suzhou University First Hospital at a little after nine that evening, and was transplanted into the patient's body right away. The surgery was successful and the patient stayed in an aseptic room for the next three months for further observation.

The recipient, Ms. Chen, had just graduated from the university. After she became sick, she wrote her feelings in her diary every day. It showed that she was quite optimistic.

The donor in Taiwan also gave her a set of Buddhist chanting beads he had been using for ten or more years, hoping it would bring her good fortune. Grateful for the kind gesture, Ms. Chen took off her jade pendant and asked our volunteers to take it back to the donor.

It was such an extraordinary experience! I wonder if this "marrow relationship" was predestined in their previous lives.

Teamwork

In addition to the live broadcast, Tzu Chi TV also arranged for the young donor to give a telephone interview during a call-in program on June 14, the day after the transplant was made, so he could share his thoughts.

Many people called in to praise and bless him. Many audience members phoned to say that their blood samples were already in the marrow data bank, but they had not yet had the opportunity to save a life. Someone rang in to say that he and a friend had registered together, but he envied his friend because he had donated marrow to a recipient five years previously.

More than two hundred people have donated their marrow. The Tzu Chi Bone Marrow Donor Registry will be eight years old in October. In the first three years, the concept of marrow donation had still not caught on with the public, and Tzu Chi volunteers at registration drives were often reproached by people for asking them to donate their marrow. Not many people wanted to donate, so those who really wanted to join the marrow drive were indeed worthy of praise.

But now, many people have changed their traditional way of thinking. More than 217,000 people out of a total population of 20 million have joined the list of donors. The Tzu Chi registry is now the largest Chinese marrow data bank in the world. More than 8,000 people around the world have come to ask for marrow matches, and we have so far undertaken 280 successful transplants, with those from Taiwan to China becoming especially frequent this year.

There were many donors before, and there are still many willing donors waiting for their turn. Why did this young man receive so much attention and blessing? He replied, "I'm lucky!"

Indeed, we should not just bless this young donor; we should also respect some two hundred marrow donors from the past as well as potential future donors. We should bless and be grateful to each of them.

At the same time, we should also bless all the marrow recipients, because the major goal of this whole activity is to save life.

Great Love is needed to save life, and this Great Love doesn't refer to a single individual's love, but the love of a team. A marrow transplant does not just involve one person donating marrow, but a huge group of people offering their skill and support. The marrow donation promotion teams have to go around promoting the concept of marrow donation among local people. There are also care teams that accompany the donors all the way from the beginning to the end of the operation. Finally, there are the actual medical staff members who help extract the bone marrow with love and skill. We should be thankful to all of them.

Nothing is more valuable than life

We should commend and be thankful for any act that saves life.

On the Tzu Chi TV news, I saw a report about an old gentleman who took the train from Hualien and traveled halfway around Taiwan to Tzu Chi Dalin Hospital in Chiayi County just to thank Dr. Li Wen-hsing for saving his life five years before.

At that time, this old gentleman was suffering from cancer and was hospitalized in our hospital in Hualien. Dr. Li treated him with love, and after the patient was discharged Dr. Li often called to see how he was and told him to take care of himself. This warm concern touched the old gentleman.

Dr. Li was later transferred to our hospital in Dalin, but this old gentleman still spent seven or eight hours on a train so he could express his gratitude to Dr. Li. What a touching story!

Nothing in the world is more valuable than life. The doctors should be thanked for returning healthy bodies to their patients!

We have to try the best we can to promote this kind of good doctor-patient relationship.

Taiwan still treasures love

I am grateful that we could provide complete live coverage of this marrow transplant. I heard that Phoenix TV in Hong Kong alone had millions of viewers, so there must be a huge number of viewers around the world watching this touching broadcast and witnessing the process of saving a life.

Like the young Taiwanese donor said, "It feels so wonderful to save a life!" I guess all donors feel the same. When they see the gratitude and hope in the patients' families, they know that what they are giving is extremely valuable, and that it is the highest honor to be able to save a life.

When so many people are willing to donate marrow to save lives, it proves that Taiwan still treasures love greatly. I want to bless again the bone marrow donors and the recipients from the past, present and the future, that they may lead wonderful lives.