Oliver Sacks.

Oliver Sacks on Learning He Has Terminal Cancer - NYTimes.com:

Oliver Wolf Sacks, CBE (born 9 July 1933) is an American-British neurologist, writer, and amateur chemist who is Professor of Neurology at New York University School of Medicine.
Sacks has never married or lived with anyone and says that he is celibate.
In February 2015, writing in The New York Times, Sacks announced that he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer—multiple metastases in the liver from the ocular melanoma to which he had previously lost his vision in one eye. Measuring his remaining time in "months," Sacks announced his intent to "live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can," and wrote that "I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight."
"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. Nine years ago it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma. Although the radiation and lasering to remove the tumor ultimately left me blind in that eye, only in very rare cases do such tumors metastasize. I am among the unlucky 2 percent.

I feel grateful that I have been granted nine years of good health and productivity since the original diagnosis, but now I am face to face with dying. The cancer occupies a third of my liver, and though its advance may be slowed, this particular sort of cancer cannot be halted.

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure."

"Oliver Sacks - Tales of Music and The Brain" - Imagine_(TV_series).
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