Michael Dorgan: Cancer and the Present Moment

When faced with the unthinkable, Michael Dorgan had to figure out a way to cope.

When told I had metastatic cancer, I felt jerked from the stream of life like a fish on a hook. Everyone else went on with their daily routines as I watched from the waiting room of eternity. My life was ending and that filled me with dread.

Gradually, I settled on a two-pronged strategy for dealing with my rare form of cancer, which has no known cure. I’d do everything I could to stay alive while making peace with the idea of dying. Those two goals might seem in conflict, but I believed I needed to come to terms with death because living in fear of it would both weaken my ability to restrain the cancer and poison what time I had left.

Now, six years after being diagnosed, my hopes of surviving my cancer have dimmed. Yet I remain hopeful, at least hope-half-full. With help from my doctors, I may be able to keep it in check for months, even years, of quality living. If I can’t have that, I prefer to die. My purpose in life is not simply to drag it out as long as possible.

I’m grateful for first-rate health care, even though the surgeries, radiation, chemo therapy and other treatments have not healed me. I’m also grateful for Taiji and qigong, which I’ve practiced daily for decades. I can’t prove they’ve slowed my cancer’s advance, but they have helped me appreciate the present moment.

We experience life as a series of choices, and sometimes there seem to be no good ones. Often, though, we can choose our state of mind by choosing where to put our attention. Rather than marinate in gloomy thoughts, I try to focus on the precious, if fleeting, now.

With a Perspective, I’m Michael Dorgan.

Michael Dorgan is a journalist and author who lives in San Jose.