Two and a half years after the Stage 4 diagnosis, I confessed to my mother that the doctors had said I had two years to live, tops. I’d kept this information to myself because if you say it, it’s true. I told her this laughing, as if we were trading preposterous stories. “Well, I guess you’re going to have to hold your breath if you’re going to make that deadline,” she replied, in her slow Southern drawl when I gave my previously stated expiration date.

I spent the next five years holding my breath, then did the same for another five. I enacted every New Year’s resolution, past and future, all at once. Quit work that had grown stale and became a writer. Wrote a book. Went to India on assignment, fell in love with the language that was swirling around me, went back to live for a year and learn Hindi. Didn’t realize the reason I’d come to dislike that hyperbolically overachieving Lance Armstrong was that his behavior was too familiar. Take a nap, Lance! I’d think to myself, though in truth I couldn’t either.

But if I was verging on radical levels of life consumption, I had a reason: No one had told me I wasn’t going to die soon. About 12 years out, my doctor finally did.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • Psychology • Science & Technology

1. Gartenfrau wrote: Thanks for posting this.  My son had Hodgkins Lymphoma and we’re coming up on the 1st anniversary of his Bone Marrow Transplant.  We were just discussing last night how emotions hit us hard at strange times and how we both still fear his cancer will return even though he’s had now 2 sets of good test results.  I’ll pass this on to him. FWIW he’s doing well and graduates from high school in June. April 28, 8:28 am | [comment link]

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