This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. My guest Henry Marsh is a renowned British neurosurgeon

who was awarded a CBE by the Queen for services to medicine in the UK and Ukraine.

For over 30 years he's been making frequent trips to Ukraine, performing surgery, teaching,

and trying to reform and update the medical system. His work in Ukraine was the subject of an

award-winning documentary called The English Surgeon. In England he was one of the first neurosurgeons

to perform certain brain surgeries using only local anesthesia, enabling the patient to remain

awake and provide feedback in real time about how the surgery was affecting the brain.

Dr. Marsh's new memoir is about retiring from surgery and soon after becoming a patient himself,

diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. He shares his reflections on what it was like to walk

into the hospital as a member of the, quote, underclass of patients, and no longer a, quote,

self-important surgeon. As a patient, he was sometimes haunted by the way he sometimes treated

his own patients. His illness led to sobering thoughts about Dr. patient relationships, aging,

death, medically assisted suicide, and how to best live his remaining time. He's in remission now,

but there's a 75% chance of the cancer returning in the next five years. His new memoir is called

and finally, Matters of Life and Death. It begins with the time, just 20 months before the

cancer diagnosis, when he participated as one of the subjects in a study of brain scans of healthy

people. He thought his brain scan would look pretty good. He was in despair when it showed his 70-year-old

brain was relatively shrunken and withered. Dr. Marsh, welcome back to Fresh Air. I am so glad

that you remain in remission. Well, thanks very much, Nesfer, and I have to talk to you again

after a few years. You know, you write rarely that I think about what it would be like

when what I witnessed at work every day happened to me. Why didn't you think about that? I know

every time I walk into a hospital to visit a friend or, you know, a loved one, I worry about them,

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