The Brain Tumor (1) Some people with cancer say that it's the best thing that's ever happened to them. It forces them to re-evaluate their lifestyles, the choices they make, the lives they're leading. They have to re-evaluate how they spend their time, what kinds of food they eat, what kinds of people they surround themselves with, and even what kinds of thoughts they have. It calls into question life itself. It forces the patient to ask questions they would have never asked otherwise. For some, it leads them to spiritual questions. For others, philosophical questions. The survivors of cancer are some of the most enlightened people I've ever met. If only everyone could get cancer. Cancer led me to questions about medical science, philosophy, and even economics. I suppose this is because I'm an economist by education and a mutual fund analyst by trade, but it's also because my case is far different than any other case of cancer known to exist. In fact, it's not a cancer at all, but that's the closest thing the doctors could use to describe it. The life of a mutual fund analyst is not an easy one. Most people don't stop to imagine the sort of stress mutual fund analysts are under. Most mutual funds investors are saving for their retirement. They have a long time horizon and they're not out for the quick buck, but they absolutely must have enough to retire on when the time comes. A lot of peoples' retirement safety rests in our hands. I take this responsibility very seriously. Probably too seriously. First of all, I refuse to underperform the market. Why would someone pay me to manage their money for them when they could just as easily do it themselves with less fees using an index fund? Second of all, I'm very hard on myself when I perform poorly, but I don't take credit easily when I perform well. In other words, I'm a typical American business person, obsessed with my job, stressed to the max, with very little time for trivialities like fun, family, vacations, and happiness, much less health. I never worked less than ten hours a day, sometimes more if I'm underperforming. I wake up several times during the night to check off-hours trading. Of course, I have to live in New York City, the center of all the action. My meals typically consist of fast food, gobbled quickly while pouring through mounds of prospectuses and quarterly earning statements, or watching the stock tickers carefully. I was miserable and I didn't even know it. My headaches were starting to become unbearable. At first, I just took several aspirin and tried to go back to my work, but it wasn't always effective, and I'd have to take even more. I didn't have the time to go to the doctor, so I just ignored the problem. The aspirin was a losing battle, so I tried to just cope. This was impossible, of course. My job required a huge amount of attention to detail, which I simply wasn't capable of when I had one of these headaches. Sometimes, I wasn't even able think at all. I was quickly becoming incapable of doing my job, so I finally went to a doctor. Going to the doctor felt like going to confessions. "Are you taking care of yourself?" the doctor asked. I felt ashamed and hung my head low in repentance. The doctor wasn't very forgiving, and he gave me a lecture about the necessity of a healthy diet, plenty of rest, and regular vacations for stress relief. I tried to make up excuses about how busy I was, but he just shrugged and said, "if you don't make time for your health, your body will do it for you." The doctor took several X-rays. "Hmm," the doctor said. That's one of those things nobody wants to hear from their doctor when they're looking at their X-rays. "I'm afraid I have some bad news." He pointed out a small circle on the X-ray. "I take it that's not supposed to be there," I said stupidly. He told me that the small circle I see in the X-ray is a brain tumor. He told me that it's small enough that we still have some hope of doing something about it, but big enough that we have very little time. And the tumor is growing. He recommended that I visit a brain cancer specialist, but the cancer specialist didn't have anything more reassuring to tell me. He recommended I undergo radiation treatment. I was wondering when my life would flash before my eyes. I was already picturing myself planning my burial. In all of it, I actually laughed a bit. Imagine a guy like me, who spends his entire life helping other people to retire, dies without being able to retire himself. The irony of it all was pretty funny. I consented to the radiation. I wasn't sure what it was all about, but when a doctor tells me to do something, I do it. I'm a professional and people pay me for my expertise on matters of money, trusting that I have their best interests in mind. I treat every profession likewise. Instead of doing my own thinking, I pay someone else to do my thinking for me. This is what business is all about. The results of the radiation were astounding. The doctors said they've never seen anything like it before. Instead of shrinking, the tumor actually spread itself out laterally. It was the same size, only flatter. They consulted every journal and cancer specialist they could find but not one has ever heard of this happening. They begged to use me as a subject for study, but I had work to do. The good news is the headaches went away. I went back to work immediately and was able to focus better than ever. I found myself picking out minute details that I would have never noticed before, things which had profound effects on the fund's overall performance. My achievements were recognized and I was promoted. This meant I had to work even harder than before. Other things began to change as well. I wasn't just noticing things about the fund, but many other things as well. I began to find myself profoundly curious about things I never thought of before. I was fascinated by everyday things. One day, I broke into tears when I saw a bird flying outside my window. I looked into the bird's eyes as it perched on my window sill, pecking around for food. It looked up at me, tilted its head a bit, and flew off. It was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, yet it was something I've seen hundreds of times before. Somehow I never noticed its beauty. Looking is not the same as seeing. Acknowledging is not the same as appreciating. That day at work was very different than any other day. I was still performing superbly, but somehow it didn't matter so much. I kept remembering that bird, the beauty of its wings, the freedom it must have felt as it flew. It was such a contrast to life in an office. I started wondering how birds got to be the way they are. I left work early that day and took a trip to the library. With the same intensity that I used to pour over quarterly earnings statements, I found myself sifting through book after book about birds. Time became a blur. It seemed like minutes later when the librarian announced that they would be closing soon. I looked down and realized I had twelve books out, sprawled on the table, several of them open for purposes of cross-referencing. I've never been this fascinated by anything in my life. Even economics didn't fascinate me this much. I started making a habit of leaving work to go to the library. Instead of catching up on prospectuses, I began spending my weekends reading and studying about birds. My study of birds eventually led me to a fascination with biology, a subject that I've always hated in the past. Somehow, I was seeing fascinating angles on biology that I've never seen before. I studied genetics and evolution quite a bit at first, as these were the most relevant to my questions about the bird. I started seeing my job as more of an obstacle, something that kept me away from my studies. Here I was, months after the initial radiation treatment, the tumor still there, but I was feeling better than ever, but I was also very, very different. This was when I started talking to myself. Not just thinking outloud either. I was having full blown conversations with myself. It felt like there were two versions of me having a conversation. Actually, it felt like I was talking to someone else entirely. It was like multiple personalities, but most people with this condition aren't aware of the other personalities. I would just sit there having a nice little chat with myself. It was disturbing to say the least. I wanted to make an appointment with a psychologist, but I said to myself, "why don't I just go to the library and study it myself, like I do with everything else I'm curious about?" Then I said, "because I'm not an authority on the subject. I want to go to someone who specializes in this sort of thing." "What makes me think I can't know more about my condition than a specialist?" I asked myself. "The doctors didn't understand the tumor, but I let them fire all this radiation into my brain. It was an invasive approach. Invasion is a very naive way to solve problems. I should give myself some credit and take responsibility for my own conditions." This really began to bother me because some of the things I was saying were pointedly not me. I decided to go to a psychologist immediately. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when the psychologist said he never heard of the problem before. When I told him about my tumor, he said I need to go back to the doctor immediately. So I made another appointment with the cancer specialist. The doctor took some more X-rays to see how far the tumor had progressed. The X-rays showed that the tumor had spread even further across my brain, and although the doctor again admitted he didn't understand it, he insisted that I undergo radiation treatment yet again. This had the same effect as before, causing the tumor to spread even further out. The doctor still didn't understand it, but assured me that we could beat it if only we subject it to enough radiation. Well, I knew enough about systems theory to understand that this was starting to become a positive feedback loop. This thought somehow struck a chord with me and this was the first time that I started seeing connections between seemingly unrelated events. I started wondering about the underlying fallacy behind the doctor's unconscious positive feedback loop. I started wondering what cultural myth is perpetuating this way of thinking. I started thinking about how crime is fought with guns and police, and although it never works, the solution is to just throw more guns and police at the problem, knowing good and well that this won't work either. It seems our culture tries to solve problems by doing more of what didn't work in the past, instead of trying something completely different. This was the first time thoughts like these ran through my head, but it certainly wasn't the last. I finally decided to take medical matters into my own hands and go back to the library. I studied everything I could get my hands on, but I wasn't able to turn up a thing. "What's the problem?" I asked myself. "The tumor isn't causing headaches anymore, and in fact it's only making me smarter than before. So I talk to myself sometimes. What does that hurt?" "I don't know," I said. "I guess it's that part of me doesn't feel like myself." "Who is myself?" I asked. I sat with that for a while. I had no answer. Who is myself? Is myself a slave to a mutual fund company? Is myself a guy with cancer who talks to himself? Who am I? How would I define me? This was when I began studying philosophy. I was back at the library, sifting through everything I could find that tries to answer the question of self. I went from "I think therefore I am," to Carl Jung's concept of the collective unconscious. Then I dug through Taoism and Buddhism which says that we are all One. Quite honestly, none of this jived well with my economist mind. I thought they were all just as confused as I was. Reading this garbage just made me even more confused, so I decided to use a rule that always works in economics: keep it simple. Stick to the obvious. What do I feel like? What do I see when I look at myself? Well, this was easy. I was a human body, a bag of flesh, if you will, with a command center at the top. "So my body contains my entire self," I said. "Within that body is myself." "Are there no other living things inside myself?" I asked. That was an odd question. Then I realized where this thought was taking me. "This body that I proclaim to be 'me' is filled with thousands of independent, living organisms," I said to myself. "Which of these organisms is 'me'? All of them? What about when some of them die? Am I still me?" "Of course I'm still me," I said to myself, but it didn't make sense. It was all very confusing. The more I thought about it, the harder it became to draw the line between me and not-me. Finally I just gave up on it and decided that there is no such line. Perhaps some of those philosophers were on to something. There is no self. Self is an illusion. Nothing is separate, but instead connected in a very fundamental, basic way. What is outside "me" is not something other than me, just a continuation. "Maybe my tumor is also a part of me," I said to myself. "Maybe," I replied, "maybe." At this, I began to accept my condition, and even welcome it. It was right about this time that I heard a gun shot down on the street level. My heart started racing as I dropped to the floor. Then as I slowly crawled to the window to see what was going on, I heard two more shots ring out in the night sky and a screeching of tires. By the time I reached the window and looked downstairs, I saw a woman laying motionless on the ground, bleeding from the chest. Welcome to New York City, I thought to myself. I felt a flood of mixed emotions as I quickly dialed 911. My heart was pounding what felt like a hundred times a second. It felt like it was beating so hard that it would jump out of my chest. I felt fear for my life, and for the woman who was shot. I also felt sadness, remorse that such a tragedy could happen. I also felt anger at whomever shot the woman. All of this was going through me as I told the emergency operator the situation. The ambulance arrived impressively soon considering that it was New York. Since I was a witness, the police asked me to go with them. They asked me a lot of questions, and told me to stay in town while they did their investigations. Then they let me go. The first thing I wanted to do was go to the hospital to visit that woman. The nurse said that she would make it, but couldn't have any visitors for a week. That week went by like years. I couldn't stop thinking about what had happened. I was haunted by nightmares every single night. The anguish was so intense, far more intense than any emotion I had felt in my life. I finally made a resolution. I became determined that I would understand why things like this happen in our culture, why there is so much suffering and violence. As I was going through all of this, I noticed that I had completely forgotten about my cancer and I realized that compassion for others is like a drug. It makes us forget about our own problems. I finally was allowed to visit the woman in the hospital. She had no idea who I was of course. I told her that I was the one who called the ambulance. Then out of the blue, she began crying. I had no idea how to react to something like this, but I instinctively reached my hand out to hers and waited patiently as she cried. "I could imagine how traumatic that experience must have been for you," I told her. She giggled a bit through her drying tears. "I wasn't crying because of the experience," she said. "Why were you crying?" I asked. "I am so alone!" she said. That's an odd reaction to an experience like that. I must have just sat there looking baffled until she finally explained. "When you told me that you were the one who called the ambulance," she said, "I thought to myself that if you hadn't, nobody would have. I have no family or friends in this big, lonely city, and nobody would have even noticed I was gone." I continued holding her hand as she explained to me the story. Her name was Elizabeth. She was a quiet girl who lived on her own. She decided that night to walk home instead of taking the subway, but she got lost and ended up in an alley where some guys were hanging out, obviously strung out on several drugs. They asked her for her purse and she said no, so they shot her. She was still standing, holding her purse, so they shot her again twice, grabbed her purse, and drove off in a car. She had no friends, and neither did I. Who has time for friends? I decided to start making time. When she left the hospital, we spent every day together. I talked to her about my cancer, and she talked to me about her parents, one of whom was dead, the other in jail. "Why is the world like this?" she asked. "I don't know," I told her, "but I'm going to find out." I was at work the next day, analyzing some stocks, absorbed in thought, though my mind wasn't really on my work. I just kept thinking about Elizabeth, but I tried to focus harder on my work at hand. I had before me a set of stocks that I was considering for the fund. There was a pharmaceutical company, a toy company, a fashion company, a defense contractor, a food and tobacco company, and a media company. All have shown consistent growth over a long period of time, and all were known for their ruthless business practices. These are very, very important characteristics for companies that make it into our fund.
Go to part: 1 2
Copyright © 2002 Prepense |