Oliver Sacks, the famed neurologist who has published five popular books and had a Hollywood movie made about him, announced in an inspirational essay in
The New York Times that he has terminal cancer.
Sacks wrote that his "luck had run out" because he learned that a tumor in one of his eyes which he thought radiation had destroyed nine years ago had returned and metastasized in his liver.
People magazine noted that Sacks may be best known for being portrayed by the late Robin Williams in the 1990 movie "Awakenings," which was based on the physician's book about encephalitic lethargica patients who "woke up" after decades of sleep after Sacks realized the benefits of the drug L-Dopa.
Sacks memoir "On the Move" will be released this May, said People.
"I feel grateful that I have been granted nine years of good health and productivity since the original diagnosis, but now I am face to face with dying," Sacks wrote in his essay. "The cancer occupies a third of my liver, and though its advance may be slowed, this particular sort of cancer cannot be halted."
"It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me," Sack continued. "I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can."
At the end of the essay, Sacks said the uncertainty his future is overcome by the life he has lived and life he wants to continue living.
"I cannot pretend I am without fear," Sacks wrote. "But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers."
"Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure," he concluded.
Sacks moved many on social media by his essay.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.