Oliver Sacks, bestselling author and British neurologist, has revealed in an essay he penned for The New York Times titled "My Own Life" that he has been diagnosed with terminal cancer.
"A month ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health," Sacks wrote. "At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out - a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver. Nine years ago it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma. Although the radiation and lasering to remove the tumor ultimately left me blind in that eye, only in very rare cases do such tumors metastasize. I am among the unlucky 2 percent."
Among Sacks' most well-known works are "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," and "Awakenings," the autobiographical book written in 1973 that was turned into an 1990 Oscar-nominated film starring Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro.
Sacks has published a total of 13 books - five of which were published between ages 65 and 81. Sacks said he has a few unfinished works left, according to the U.K.'s The Telegraph. Sacks announced on his Twitter account that his memoir, "On The Move," is due out May 1.
Sacks has months to live, but he wrote that it doesn't mean he is done living.
"It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me," Sacks wrote. "I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can."
Sacks has contributed to The New Yorker and The New York Times Review of Books and was awarded the 2001 Lewis Thomas Prize, according to New York Daily News. The New York Times has hailed Sacks as the "poet laureate of modern medicine," according to The Telegraph. His writing has been translated into 25 languages.
Sacks finished his essay with stirring words of hope:
"I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.
"This will involve audacity, clarity and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world. But there will be time, too, for some fun (and even some silliness, as well).
"I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at "NewsHour" every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.
"This is not indifference but detachment - I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future. I rejoice when I meet gifted young people - even the one who biopsied and diagnosed my metastases. I feel the future is in good hands.
"I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate - the genetic and neural fate - of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.
"I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.
"Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure."
