D. G. Myers on Cancer, Dying, and Living

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4.7 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 14 July 2014

⏱️ 69 minutes

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Summary

D.G. Myers, literary critic and cancer patient, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the lessons he has learned from receiving a cancer diagnosis six years ago. Myers emphasizes the importance of dealing with cancer honestly and using it as a way to focus attention on what matters in life. The conversation illuminates the essence of opportunity cost and the importance of allocating our time, perhaps our scarcest resource, wisely. The last part of the conversation discusses a number of literary issues including the role of English literature and creative writing in American universities.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts,
0:07.8	of Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org, or you can subscribe,
0:14.4	comment on this podcast, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:19.6	You'll also find our archives where you can listen to every episode we've ever done going
0:23.3	back to 2006. Our email address is mailadycontalk.org. We'd love to hear from you.
0:32.5	Today is July 10, 2014, and my guest is DG Myers. He is a literary critic, author,
0:40.0	and he is dying of cancer. That combination makes this episode of econ talk a little out of the
0:45.6	ordinary. David, welcome to econ talk. Go ahead, do be here, Mr. Roberts. Now, I invite you to be a
0:51.9	guest after I read your remarkable essay, The Mercy of Sickness Before Death, which is about what
0:58.0	it's like to be a terminal cancer patient. I believe that that essay and the lessons of that essay
1:05.0	tell us something important related to economics. We're going to get to that, but I want to start with
1:09.2	your medical situation. When were you diagnosed and what was the nature of the diagnosis? As I wrote
1:14.9	in my most recent PAPEO's essay, which was retitled by my editor, quitting the cancer battle.
1:22.3	My original title was New Hope for the Dying. I was first diagnosed around the Jewish holiday
1:30.5	of Sukkot, which is in the fall of 2007. I was in the good medical habit of getting a routine
1:42.9	physical examination every year, partly on the understanding that a man my age, and I was only
1:52.4	55 in 2007, was protected against prostate cancer by an annual physical. Nevertheless, my physician
2:05.8	discovered what he called an opacity on my chest x-ray. Doctors are wonderful for avoiding what
2:14.5	the cancer memoirist Christina Middlebrook calls the stink words. So he wouldn't commit himself to
2:22.0	to anything that might make my nose wrinkle. But he found an opacity he told me on my chest x-ray.
2:30.4	This happened just before the hog, the holiday of Sukkot. So I couldn't schedule a visit with him
2:40.1	to get a biopsy for a couple of three days. And those, as you might imagine, were three dreadful days
	...

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