By CHADI NABHAN, MD, MBA, FACP
Have you
thought about your own mortality?
Who hasn’t,
given the frequency of seeing death and grief depicted in the media or through
real life encounters with friends, relatives, neighbors, or patients? These
incidents trigger uncomfortable and sometimes uneasy thoughts of how we might
personally deal with potential illness and disease. The same thoughts are soon
displaced by the busyness of living.
Despite
dealing with the death of his mother from a brain tumor, we learn David
Fajgenbaum was healthy, living life to its fullest, and a future doctor in the
making. He may have thought about his own mortality as he grieved the death of
his mother, but likely never imagined anything dire would happen to him.
Fajgenbaum was pushing forward on several fronts, including leading a
non-for-profit organization for grieving college students, symbolically named
“Actively Moving Forward” or “AMF” after his mother’s initials, all while first
playing college football and then attending medical school. By all accounts,
this was a vigorous young man, meticulous about his diet and physicality. When he became ill, it was a blunt reminder
that life is unpredictable.
In his book “Chasing my Cure”, Dr. Fajgenbaum takes us back to the time when he first got ill. He vividly describes his physical symptoms and various scans which detected his enlarged nodes. Interestingly, we learn how long he was in denial of these symptoms, thereby delaying medical attention in favor of studying. This neglect of self-care highlights part of his personality, but also represents the pressure and expectations placed upon a majority of medical students.
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