ah it's good to be home I was born the unintended and unwanted child to a woman who probably had other options but I was adopted at six weeks of age I remember it like it was yesterday wrapped in a towel they brought me home and showed me to my sister and she took one look at me and she said he's not very cute can we take him back and exchange him for another baby well growing up in this house as an adopted child there's so much mystery and they didn't know what I was gonna look
like they didn't know what I was gonna be good at they didn't know really anything and but it did become apparent at age four and a half that I wasn't growing I wasn't developing and I was showing incredible signs of stress so that was the beginning of a four year journey of going from hospital to hospital to hospital to hospital meeting with doctor after doctor after doctor after doctor test after test after test one test in particular was one they wanted to figure out if at my digestive tract was blocked so they made me swallow
something attached to a string and they put the spool of string on my shoulder and they would track to see how much string went through well one day in a common area little boy with a toy airplane was going and he put it right into my strength and so they panicked and left the nurse came in and saw this toy airplane in my string and she's like no no no honey you have to leave it alone and so for the next three days I was in a straitjacket I told her I didn't do it but
she didn't believe me but the tests were just unbelievable plus back in those days hospitals were different this is the 60s there was a bed and a chair in the corner and I would be spending night after night after night in these hospital rooms and my mother could only take so much I loved her she was the greatest of all time so she you know would sleep there when she could and she would you know she would look after the other kids when she couldn't and on those nights I'd have to be alone in the
room this journey went on for a very long time and finally it became obvious that we needed to go to the granddaddy of all Children's Hospital Boston Children's I had every symptom of SH walkman diamond syndrome and so I was meeting dr. Harry schwanman himself he put me through every test and he said he doesn't have it hmm but here's what I recommend go home live your days whatever time he has left to enjoy it at that time I was off dairy and sugar and flour and I had to drink this ugly supplement and it
was just like it was like he could go home live and joy I'm thinking to myself birthday cake for the first time in memory so we went home and it was apparent that my parents were shattered exhausted they had really nothing left and at that time I was on this supplement that I mentioned earlier you know how when you go to Walgreens these days where they have like flavor of the month which is grape or bubblegum or black cherry for that supplement flavor of the ever was chalk and not chocolate chalk or vanilla chalk it
was just plain chalk and I hated it and so pretty soon I got to be like most kids manipulative Oh mom I I feel myself gagging can I drink this in the bathroom in case I get sick sure honey oh that was terrible why do you make me drink this so of course one day I get busted and she cuz you have to drink this I go I can't I hate it I won't I know I'm just refused so he came up with this phenomenal compromise where they put a tube up my nose down my
esophagus and they put the I was awesome it was way better than drinking it and so that's what it looked like and so when I wasn't using the tube I would tape it to the side of my face and put it over my ear but my parents I mean they were done for years this so our family doctor had an intervention and said Ernie Dorothy you need to take a morning off and they're like yeah right how are we going to do that because it was a brand-new facility at the University that they're teaching kids
how to skate from 8 to noon every day he'll be supervised he'll have a good time he'll be with other kids and the cool air and there will help his lung condition quite a bit and so I went to the rink and I walked in and they looked at me like what's wrong with you I'm looking at 150 well kids and it's like yes and I go you never been fed through your nose before so I would do that and what was remarkable was I go skating every weekend I was happier than ever been I
loved it I was with well kids and my health miraculously started to improve so I skated three days a week then five days a week and then I take private lessons and then I ended up competing and I was okay regionally like Ohio Michigan Indiana but outside of that and that's so good in fact my very first nationals I ever competed again the novice level I was on they put the novice men's event at the same night as the senior ladies championship really I still want to slap whoever scheduled it so I'm skating now is
a little novice boy in front of 17,500 people and I rose to the occasion five times I fell five times and came in dead last it was humiliating yet this was the only thing giving me health so my parents stayed behind me they stayed behind the next year I went back and ninth again the next year I go back in juniors and I actually was so close to the bottom very close to the bottom and it was after that competition that my mother came home and she goes okay everybody family meeting what's the family meeting
well I've just come from the doctor and I have an illness called cancer and I just want y'all to know that everything's gonna be fine and I'm gonna go through some medicine and I may have to have some surgery but I'm gonna need a little help around the house my mother was teaching school full-time raising a family and going to school at night to get a better job to pay for my skating I loved her she was a four-by-four and the most amazing woman I'd ever known I worshipped her she was so sacrificial she never
did anything for herself I only remember wearing the same three sets of clothes and so for the next two years she battled this thing with everything she had and and two years later I'm on the senior level now and I go to Nationals to compete and I go out and normal I'm out of shape I'm ill prepared I'm a mess I'm just like I always am and I mopped up the ice and I came in ninth of course what else but the devasting anything about that was that was the last time she ever saw me
skate how do I live without her she was everything to me I'm not ready to live without her but I had to move on 20 years later I'm in an emergency room in Peoria Illinois 50 cities into a 60-city tour of stars and ice and I had some nominal pain I was sure it was an ulcer because I worked way too hard and they sat me down they go you we found a mass and I'm like and they go what's so funny I go well I mean look at me you always ever really used the
word mass in description to me before and he said no no this is either benign malignant or something else and in that moment I realized that I was being diagnosed with the same disease that took my mother from me and all I saw was diminishing and suffering and dying and it's like and the fear was just unbelievable I was completely enveloped in fear the next three months I had chemotherapy and I had a big surgery I thirty-eight staples fillet of Scott but I got through it back to life seven years later I'm diagnosed with the
pituitary brain tumor it's like no I can't have a brain tumor I've got a pass now cuz I've had all this other stuff they go we need to deal with this so in order to biopsy it they had to go through the top of my head take a piece of it it was a really risky surgery it went okay I guess but they found out what it was and the course of treatment was radiation where they screwed a frame to my head into my bone I was awake for that and then they had to map
the tumor and that I had to go into a machine and they radiated it and they were able to kill it and it was gone six years later I have a brain tumor this time it was surgery we're gonna go up through my nose into my optic chasm and take out the the tumor but the only problem with that was they nicked an ophthalmic artery on the way in and they had to keep an eye on that the surgery did not go as planned so nine cerebral angiogram later where they go up through your groin
and into your brain to try to fix it nine later they finally released me from the hospital and I woke up the next morning blind in my right eye so they intervened they got it I got behalf of it back six years later the brain tumor came back and while they're walking me through all the different treatment options all I kept hearing in my head was get strong get strong what do mean get strong it's strong this voice in my head said get strong I didn't know if it meant physically emotionally mentally spiritually all I
knew as a get strong and so all the above I just got strong so when they asked me to do a TED talk I'm thinking what do we have unique knowledge of suffering we all do it suffering we all do it I did tons of research I looked into the psychological philosophical spiritual identities of suffering I mean it is everywhere it's pervasive none of us are immune we're all going to go through it a hundred billion people have been estimated to be born of this planet every single one of them has suffered so what do
we need to know what do we need to know about suffering well I went everywhere and I found this outrageous study that this gentleman from Harvard did he came up with this idea that the levels of depression in the United States are higher than everywhere else how is that possible we've got everything basically it's if you have a half a million dollar house congratulations and you're surrounded by million-dollar houses you feel as though you're lacking something and it brings on this is sort of depression crazy they measured the same thing in developing countries and they
weren't worried so much about what everybody else had because all they were thinking about was survival unbelievable right so we think that a life well-lived is without suffering really to live well is to not suffer we're going to do it I mean I told you everything that I've been through it didn't sound so great right no I've got this theory I wouldn't change a day of anything that I've been through where we're gonna suffer and when we suffer we hit this fork in the road but the fork in the road isn't left or right the
fork in the road is up or down it's succumb or evolve succumb or evolve you can take the lower road and allow your suffering to totally envelop you and just continue to bring you down or you can be fascinated invested in your suffering well I would to take you to a higher level when I was standing on the podium in 1984 getting an Olympic gold medal what in the world thank you I was thinking about this is the greatest thing ever and I wish my mom were here to see it she sacrificed everything to keep
me in skating everything and then I thought about that in her voice honor her on my loser days if I didn't feel like showing up I wouldn't honor her I'm going to the ring on loser days when I felt like talking during a session and not really investing myself honor her I work harder than I've ever worked in my life if I lose her days I wouldn't do burn throughs my long program because I didn't feel like it honor her I would do competition effort run throughs every single day she made me a champion she
did it it was all her so when you think about suffering who are you gonna suffer for what is that inner voice in your head telling you I'm gonna do it for yourself are you gonna do it for other people how is it gonna work when I looked at it through that lens I realized oh my goodness I was unwanted I was chosen by the only parents I ever wanted to parent me I was sick as a child my sickness was rated in a brain tumor I was born with holy cow and those nights alone
in the hospital fortified me allowed me to be strong in my own although losing and skating by the time I was ready to win I wasn't afraid of losing anymore because I already did that my mother's death allowed me to find my greatest character to honor her and when I went through cancer Thank You cancer because without cancer I wouldn't have the wife and the children that I have today Thank You cancer and those three brain tumors yeah holy cow greatest thing going they made sure that when I was little I didn't build a muscle
that wasn't built on the ice it ignited my faith I've never been more powerful in my life because I know what I can endure which way are you gonna go right so it's like this if you're suffering right now own it embrace it love it get every single thing you can get out of it and you'll be amazed at what happens next my coach always told me when I was whining or complaining that the absence of pain is death deep guy right so whatever you're going through right now know that it's normal it's natural all
the cool kids are doing it and we've got to find a way to go he also said to me one time but human is a social animal it cannot survive without other humans if you know someone's suffering help them I found in my research that 42 percent of America is suffering from hunger or they are hunger challenged if you can do it feed somebody mother Tracy said if you love the person standing directly in front of you you will change the world you'll change the world so as this short bald half neutered T mode radiated
surgically repaired retired male figure skater of unknown ethnic origin who has a lifelong history of collecting life-threatening illness when I tell you in the immortal words of Yogi Berra when you get to that fork in the road take it take it live your days live your days thank you very much
