By Tricycle — 1997
An interview with Rick Fields on living with cancer.
Read on tricycle.org
CLEAR ALL
A month ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out—a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver.
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For cancer patients, untreated depression can mean they stop taking prescriptions, skip their cancer treatment or start engaging in behaviors like smoking or overeating that can harm their health.
I’ve discovered that growing older hasn’t been a Lego-like replacement of “young” Ken figures with increasingly older versions. Instead, all of these younger selves are still very much alive and thriving, layered and integrated over the years.
I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn’t one of them. Although I was given a dry, leathery corpse to dissect in anatomy class in my first term, our textbooks contained almost nothing about aging or frailty or dying.
Every day, I get closer to the brink of everything. We’re all headed that way, of course, even when we’re young, though most of us are too busy with Important Matters to ponder our mortality.