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In April 2015, at the age of 55, I was diagnosed with one of the most lethal and aggressive brain tumors, a brainstem glioblastoma multiforme in an advanced stage. The prognosis was both grim and precise: Without treatment, I might have a few months; with treatment, I could last six months. If I beat overwhelming odds, I’d toast the new year one last time.
During the time my doctors were converging on my cancer diagnosis, interest was building here in California for a law, called “aid in dying,” that would allow physicians to help patients end their lives....
Then, I learned that while the aid-in-dying law had been enacted, it contained a procedural delay: It would not be effective until the following June, in 2016, long past my predicted death. I decided I wasn’t going to move to Oregon or another state that permitted assisted suicide, since it would eventually be legal in my state. I would wait if I could, and I would use extralegal means if I began to slip beforehand.... I was ready....
Then a peculiar thing happened: I started to get better.
I came back to the world, hesitantly at first. I noticed that I was getting stronger: I had been almost bedridden in the early stages of my illness, too weak to walk. But my strength began to return, and as it did, I felt the dizziness that had come with the diagnosis recede. I regained my balance.... Soon, I was having somewhat normal days, doing some professional things, socializing and exercising. . . .
I’ve now lived longer and better than anybody had projected. Suddenly, it’s hard to see self-termination in quite the same way. I could have missed all this....
We do what we can, and luck will, in its own time, usher us on to some other world. The chances are excellent that my original diagnosis is correct (I believe it is) and that at some point, the inevitable will happen, and I will die by my own hand or by fate. But I am not trying to find my way to clear, simple feelings anymore. Instead, long beyond what was expected, I am simply living.
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