In 2013, I am named director of the brain bank, and I quickly settle into this exciting new phase of my career. My work with rat and human brains has long since given me widespread recognition among my colleagues. Indeed, it’s what put me on the path that, twenty years after my first paper on the subject, has landed me in charge of so many precious human samples.
Despite multiple discoveries in mental-health research, scientists don’t yet completely understand what isn’t working in the brains of people with mental illness, and determining how to fix it will likely take many decades and require tenacious dedication from every researcher involved.
And so, despite my brushes with cancer, I work hard, publishing scores of scientific articles and sharing my findings with hundreds of other investigators as we all tackle questions about abnormal genes and the problems they create.
A naturally high-energy person, I bike twenty miles to my office, work all day, then cycle back to our quiet house in the suburbs. Every night at dinner, Mirek and I sit on our elevated back porch as if we are on the deck of a ship sailing through a green sea of woods and grass. We revel in the many birds around us: huge woodpeckers with red caps, tiny house wrens building nests in our flowerpots, colorful hummingbirds feeding on our red impatiens. We feel exceedingly content with life.
Everything seems to be going right—but very soon, I will begin to wonder whether the rats from my early experiments are exacting their revenge on me. Because the same brain structure that I sabotaged in thousands of rodents will begin to malfunction, spectacularly, in my own brain. The cause will not be a neurotoxin injected into my hippocampus that damages my frontal cortex. It will be something far more prosaic, and far more familiar: cancer.
2
The Vanishing Hand
At the beginning of January 2015, roughly two and a half years after handling my first human brain, I decide to fulfill a dream I’ve held for years: to compete in an Ironman Triathlon. Though I’ve completed several Olympic-distance triathlons, I’ve never tried anything as challenging as an Ironman, which is 140.6 miles of combined swimming, running, and cycling. But it’s now or never, my last reasonable chance before I’m too old. I plan to train with a coach and compete this summer or fall in a half Ironman, with three stages that cover a combined distance of 70.3 miles. If that goes well, I will attempt a full Ironman the following year, when I’m at the ripe old age of sixty-five.
It’s going to demand incredible effort, but I feel ready and the time feels right. Mirek and our two children, who followed me from Poland some twenty-six years ago, have long since settled into our new home, making wonderful lives for themselves in America just as I have. They, too, are successful and happy. Mirek is a computer engineer in a large software company; Kasia is an endocrinologist at the Yale School of Medicine, where she focuses on diabetes; and Witek is a neuroscientist in the Brain Modulation Lab at the University of Pittsburgh. Both of my children are in happy relationships, and Kasia and her husband, Jake, have two young sons, our beloved grandsons, Lucian and Sebastian, who are growing up rapidly. Mirek and I are celebrating thirty years of a good marriage.
With my family happy and my career going so well, I can devote more time to my hobbies, especially sports. I’m obsessed with developing lean, powerful muscles, not only to feel healthy and strong but because I like looking healthy and strong too. I’m in excellent shape and eager to become even more athletic as I prepare for my greatest physical challenge yet.
In the first days of the new year, I hire a coach and start preparations for the half Ironman. I buy my dream bike, a white carbon-fiber Cannondale Evo road bike with high-end components: eleven-speed Ultegra and deep carbon wheels. Since swimming is my slowest event, I decide to concentrate over the winter on my swimming technique. Several times a week, I get up before dawn and go to a nearby pool to swim eighty to a hundred laps—about two to three thousand yards—before heading to work.
On a Thursday morning toward the end of January, as I pull myself from the pool after one of my first training sessions, I suddenly feel dizzy.
I must have overtrained or run out of calories, I tell myself.
I’m looking forward to a productive and upbeat day. Tomorrow morning, I’m leaving for a conference on brain research in Montana, where I’m meeting Witek and his girlfriend, Cheyenne, for work and skiing, and I’m excited about the trip. But as I drive to work, I have a strange feeling that something’s off. My driving feels shaky, although I can’t tell what’s wrong.
At my office, I sit down and begin to eat a bowl of steel-cut oatmeal I brought from home. I reach out to switch on my computer.
My stomach clenches.
My right hand is gone.
I can’t see it. It’s disappeared.
I move my hand toward the left.
There it is! It’s back!
But when I slide it back to the lower-right quadrant of the computer keyboard, it vanishes
