“This illness is incurable, it’s terminal, and it’ll finally kill you. Inform your kids, inform your loved ones, they should know the reality.”
Dr. Phil Stieg’s verdict got here after my mind surgical procedure at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York Metropolis. He’d extracted a lime-size mass from my proper parietal lobe — glioblastoma, a malignant, incurable grade 4 mind most cancers, often known as G.B.M.
I had about 15 months to reside, he instructed me, possibly a bit extra with good therapy. It was July 2019.
Demise was not alien to me. I had spent my profession dealing with it down, my very own and others, as a world correspondent for The New York Occasions and elsewhere. I’d lined wars from Cambodia in 1978 on by means of Iraq and Afghanistan, and I’d seen my share of carnage.
However, if I’m sincere, I by no means thought I’d die myself. And I didn’t.
What truly occurred was even stranger.
The truth is, the day of the surgical procedure was the primary day of what I’ve come to think about as my Second Life.
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The French neuroscientist David Servan-Schreiber, who survived 18 years with mind most cancers, is one in all many philosophers of most cancers who converse of the phenomenon of the Second Life. Confronted with a terminal analysis, sufferers notice {that a} new vista has simply opened up. It is one in all docs, impairment and uncertainty, to make certain, but in addition one in all shocking beauties and advantages.
