Cancer Diagnosis Inspirational Quotes

I have another scan this week," I say lightly, hoping to reassure my loved ones that it is safe to rejoin my orbit. There is always another scan, because this is my reality. But the people I know are often busy contending with mildly painful ambition and the possibility of reward. I try to begrudge them nothing, except I'm not alongside them anymore. In the meantime, I have been hunkering down with old medical supplies and swelling resentment. I tried— haven't I tried? — to avoid fights and remember birthdays. I showed up for dance recitals and listened to weight-loss dreams and kept the granularity of my medical treatments in soft focus. A person like that would be easier to love, I reasoned. I try a small experiment and stop calling my regular rotation of friends and family, hoping that they will call me back on their own. _This is not a test. This is not a test._ The phone goes quiet, except for a handful of calls. I feel heavy with strange new grief. Is it bitter or unkind to want everyone to remember what I can't forget? Who wants to be confronted with the reality that we are all a breath away from a problem that could alter our lives completely? A friend with a very sick child said it best: I'm everyone's inspiration and and no one's friend. I am asked all the time to say that, given what I've gained in perspective, I would never go back. Who would want to know the truth? Before was better.

When I launched my AI career in 1983, I did so by waxing philosophic in my application to the Ph.D. program at Carnegie Mellon. I described AI as “the quantification of the human thinking process, the explication of human behavior,” and our “final step” to understanding ourselves. It was a succinct distillation of the romantic notions in the field at that time and one that inspired me as I pushed the bounds of AI capabilities and human knowledge. Today, thirty-five years older and hopefully a bit wiser, I see things differently. The AI programs that we’ve created have proven capable of mimicking and surpassing human brains at many tasks. As a researcher and scientist, I’m proud of these accomplishments. But if the original goal was to truly understand myself and other human beings, then these decades of “progress” got me nowhere. In effect, I got my sense of anatomy mixed up. Instead of seeking to outperform the human brain, I should have sought to understand the human heart. It’s a lesson that it took me far too long to learn. I have spent much of my adult life obsessively working to optimize my impact, to turn my brain into a finely tuned algorithm for maximizing my own influence. I bounced between countries and worked across time zones for that purpose, never realizing that something far more meaningful and far more human lay in the hearts of the family members, friends, and loved ones who surrounded me. It took a cancer diagnosis and the unselfish love of my family for me to finally connect all these dots into a clearer picture of what separates us from the machines we build. That process changed my life, and in a roundabout way has led me back to my original goal of using AI to reveal our nature as human beings. If AI ever allows us to truly understand ourselves, it will not be because these algorithms captured the mechanical essence of the human mind. It will be because they liberated us to forget about optimizations and to instead focus on what truly makes us human: loving and being loved. Reaching that point will require hard work and conscious choices by all of us. Luckily, as human beings, we possess the free will to choose our own goals that AI still lacks. We can choose to come together, working across class boundaries and national borders to write our own ending to the AI story. Let us choose to let machines be machines, and let humans be humans. Let us choose to simply use our machines, and more importantly, to love one another.

When a life-threatening diagnosis comes knocking on your door in the form of cancer, it is impossible to deny the reality of your impending mortality.

Two years prior to the cancer diagnosis, while sitting in my office, I received a Divine download that told me I would write a book about healing with love and it would be called Spiritual Sugar.

I’d yell out the screen door when he was outside spraying weeds, “I love you!” When he was reading a history book on the sofa, I’d plant a kiss on his forehead and say, “I love you.” Even when the volume was turned up too loud on the television, which previously annoyed me, out came, “I love you.” Our house had become filled with love, partially because it made the misery easier to tolerate but also because having a cancer diagnosis makes you realize how much you love someone.

I sat on my patio watching the wispy clouds until the sky turned a soft shade of magenta and the sun dropped below the horizon. Over those hours, my mind let go of the day, which provided space for an unexpected message to be heard. ​The message was:  Embrace the journey. Embrace all of it, even the good and bad. You may not have chosen this journey, but it is, and forever will be, yours. I sat in silence a little longer, taking in the revelation. ​It's true. I didn’t choose cancer; cancer chose me. As much as I was desperate to skip past the chemo, surgery, radiation, and everything else that comes with a diagnosis, I needed to experience the lessons that would unfold along the way. I had to embrace it all to become a better version of myself. It was time to “embrace the journey” instead of resisting it.  ​I didn’t know if I could, but I’d try.