What almost dying taught me about living

Transcript

It was the spring of 2011,
and as they like to say in commencement speeches,
I was getting ready to enter the real world.
I had recently graduated from college
and moved to Paris to start my first job.
My dream was to become a war correspondent,
but the real world that I found
took me into a really different kind of conflict zone.
At 22 years old,
I was diagnosed with leukemia.
The doctors told me and my parents, point-blank,
that I had about a 35 percent chance of long-term survival.
I couldn't wrap my head around what that prognosis meant.
But I understood that the reality and the life I'd imagined for myself
had shattered.
Overnight, I lost my job, my apartment, my independence,
and I became patient number 5624. 

Over the next four years of chemo, a clinical trial
and a bone marrow transplant,
the hospital became my home,
my bed, the place I lived 24/7.
Since it was unlikely that I'd ever get better,
I had to accept my new reality.
And I adapted.
I became fluent in medicalese,
made friends with a group of other young cancer patients,
built a vast collection of neon wigs
and learned to use my rolling IV pole as a skateboard.
I even achieved my dream of becoming a war correspondent,
although not in the way I'd expected.
It started with a blog,
reporting from the front lines of my hospital bed,
and it morphed into a column I wrote for the New York Times,
called "Life, Interrupted." 

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https://www.ted.com/talks/suleika_jaouad_what_almost_dying_taught_me_about_living?language=zh-cn&subtitle=en