M. Gessen: commitment

Transcript context

…It was about 15 years ago that you described, with very powerful writing, the choices that you took when you learned you had a diagnosis of having some cancer mutations. If I understand this correctly, you chose to have a double mastectomy, but not to have your ovaries removed. You wrote about this in a book. Fifteen years later, what would you say to someone who faces the same diagnosis today? What advice would you give them? Or how does it look different to you 15 years on? I haven’t fully kept up with the research. I did end up having my ovaries removed when I was 50. But I’m really glad I had the extra more than a decade of hormones. I would say do your research. I think that some of the interesting things that I found when I was researching . . . And the reason I ended up writing a book is that when I found out I had this deleterious mutation — this was really in the early days of this kind of thing — I realized I couldn’t process information. Then I thought, “Oh, well, I used to be a medical reporter. I used to be able to read medical papers and actually process the stuff. I just have to stop thinking of myself as the person who is trying to make a decision and think of this as a research project.” Then I sold a series of stories to Slate, and the project was to conduct a series of interviews with people who could give me information that would help me make a decision. Then at the end of the series, make a decision. I did that over the course of something like eight weeks for Slate, and I cast a much wider net than you normally would. Normally, people would go talk to an oncologist and a genetic counselor and make a decision. You went to the Harvard economist David Laibson, right?…

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