9/18/2023 0 Comments Death conscious have a nice lifeIf someone had told me one year ago, when I was 59, that I had five years left to live, I would have been devastated and felt cheated by fate. A caress from your sweetheart during a loving, connected time feels warm and delightful, but the very same touch delivered during the middle of a heated argument feels annoying and presumptuous, bordering on violation. That fat raise you got at work seems nice until you learn that your co-worker got one twice as large as yours. Thirty minutes fly by in a conversation with a good friend, but seem interminable when waiting in line at the DMV. There is no pure sensation, only inference based on sensation. All that we perceive and feel is colored by expectation, comparison, and circumstance. Our brains are not built to measure the absolute value of anything. This leads me to a second insight: The deep truth of being human is that there is no objective experience. But our human brains are more nuanced than that, and so we can easily inhabit multiple complex, even contradictory, cognitive and emotional states. This runs counter to an old idea in neuroscience that we occupy one mental state at a time: We are either curious or fearful-we either “fight or flee” or “rest and digest” based on some overall modulation of the nervous system. I’m simultaneously furious at my terminal cancer and deeply grateful for all that life has given me. The first thing, which is obvious to most people but had to be brought home forcefully for me, is that it is possible, even easy, to occupy two seemingly contradictory mental states at the same time. I may be dying, but I’m still a science nerd, and so I think about what preparing for death has taught me about the human mind. By any reasonable measure, I’ve had a great life, full of love, creativity, and adventure. My good friends are a constant source of joy and amusement. I’ve been fortunate to have a long career in academic science with the freedom to pursue my own ideas, which is a gift like no other. My twins, Jacob and Natalie, have been nothing but a delight for 25 years. Until the moment of that diagnosis six months ago, I had been the luckiest man in town. Leaving her behind will be the very hardest part of this whole awful situation. She is the best wife anyone could want, and she is way better than I deserve. Dena has uplifted me with her pure and unconditional affection, her kindness, beauty, optimism, and keen intelligence. This wasn’t mere “chemistry” it was more akin to particle physics-a revelation of the subatomic properties of love. I was so mad, I could barely see.įive years ago, I met Dena and we fell for each other hard. Heart cancer? Who the hell gets heart cancer?! Is this some kind of horrible metaphor? This is what’s going to take me away from my beloved family, my cherished friends and colleagues? I simply couldn’t accept it. I was absolutely white-hot angry at the universe. The oncologist told me to expect to live an additional six to 18 months. Doing so would have rendered my heart unable to pump blood. Because of its location, embedded in my heart wall, the surgeon could not remove all of the cancer cells. While I was recovering from surgery, the pathology report came back and the news was bad-it wasn’t a benign teratoma after all, but rather a malignant cancer called synovial sarcoma. Riffing on the musical South Pacific, my cardiologist said, “We’re gonna pop that orange right out of your chest and send you on your way.” The doctors told me that the mass was most likely to be a teratoma, a clump of cells that is not typically malignant. Even with this large invader pressing on my heart, I had no symptoms and could exercise at full capacity. A few weeks later, an MRI scan, which has much better resolution, revealed that the mass was actually contained within the pericardial sac and was quite large-about the volume of that soda can. However, the resulting images showed that the mass did not contain the telltale signature of bursting bubbles in my stomach that would support a hernia diagnosis. Pepper and then hop up on the table for another echocardiogram before the soda bubbles in your stomach all pop.” W hen a routine echocardiogram revealed a large mass next to my heart, the radiologist thought it might be a hiatal hernia-a portion of my stomach poking up through my diaphragm to press against the sac containing my heart.
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