Outlive

Outlive

Chapter 1

The Long Game

From Fast Death to Slow Death

There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in. —Bishop Desmond Tutu

I’ll never forget the first patient whom I ever saw die. It was early in my second year of medical school, and I was spending a Saturday evening volunteering at the hospital, which is something the school encouraged us to do. But we were only supposed to observe, because by that point we knew just enough to be dangerous.

At some point, a woman in her midthirties came into the ER complaining of shortness of breath. She was Black, from East Palo Alto, a persistent pocket of poverty in that very wealthy town. While the nurses snapped a set of EKG leads on her and fitted an oxygen mask over her nose and mouth, I sat at her side, trying to distract her with small talk. What’s your name? Do you have kids? How long have you been feeling this way?

All of a sudden, her face tightened with fear and she began gasping for breath. Then her eyes rolled back and she lost consciousness.

Within seconds, nurses and doctors flooded into the ER bay and began running a “code” on her, snaking a breathing tube down her airway and injecting her full of potent drugs in a last-ditch effort at resuscitation. Meanwhile, one of the residents began doing chest compressions on her prone body. Every couple of minutes, everyone would step back as the attending physician slapped defibrillation paddles on her chest, and her body would twitch with the immense jolt of electricity. Everything was precisely choreographed; they knew the drill.

I shrank into a corner, trying to stay out of the way, but the resident doing CPR caught my eye and said, “Hey, man, can you come over here and relieve me? Just pump with the same force and rhythm as I am now, oaky?”

So I began doing compressions for the first time in my life on someone who was not a mannequin. But nothing worked. She died, right there on the table, as I was still pounding on her chest. Just a few minutes earlier, I’d been asking about her family. A nurse pulled the sheet up over her face and everyone scattered as quickly as they had arrived.

This was not a rare occurrence for anyone else in the room, but I was freaked out, horrified. What the hell just happened?

I would see many other patients die, but that woman’s death haunted me for years. I now suspect that she probably died because of a massive pulmonary embolism, but I kept wondering, what was really wrong with her? What was going on before she made her way to the ER? And would things have turned out differently if she had had better access to medical care? Could her sad fate have been changed?

Later, as a medical resident at Johns Hopkins, I would learn that death comes at two speeds: fast and slow. In inner-city Baltimore, fast death ruled the streets, meted out by guns, knives, and speeding automobiles. As perverse as it sounds, the violence of the city was a “feature” of the training program. While I chose Hopkins because of its excellence in liver and pancreatic cancer surgery, the fact that it averaged more than ten penetrating trauma cases per day, mostly gunshot or stabbing wounds, meant that my colleagues and I would have ample opportunity to develop our surgical skills repairing bodies that were too often young, black, poor, and male.

If trauma dominated the nighttime, our days belonged to patients with vascular disease, GI disease, and especially cancer. The difference was that these patients’ “wounds” were caused by slow-growing, long-undetected tumors, and not all of them survived either—not even the wealthy ones, the ones who were on top of the world. Cancer doesn’t care how rich you are. Or who your surgeon is, really. If it wants to find a way to kill you, it will. Ultimately, these slow deaths ended up bothering me even more.

But this is not a book about death. Quite the opposite, in fact.

More than twenty-five years after that woman walked into the ER, I’m still practicing medicine, but in a very different way from how I had imagined. I no longer perform cancer surgeries, or any other kind of surgery. If you come to see me with a rash or a broken arm, I probably won’t be of very much help.

So, what do I do?

Good question. If you were to meet me at a party and ask me that, I would do my best to duck out of the conversation. Or I would lie and say I’m a race car driver, which is what I really want to be when I grow up. (Plan B: shepherd.)

My focus as a physician is on longevity. The problem is that I kind of hate the word longevity. It has all sorts of terrible associations, with a centuries-long parade of quacks and charlatans who have claimed to possess the secret elixir to a longer life. I don’t want to be associated with those people, and I’m not arrogant enough to think that I possess some sort of easy answer to this problem, which has puzzled humankind for millennia. If longevity were simple, then there might not be a need for this book.

I’ll start with what longevity isn’t. Longevity does not mean living forever. Or even to age 120, or 150, which some self-proclaimed experts are now routinely promising to their followers. Barring some major breakthrough that, somehow, someway, reverses two billion years of evolutionary history and frees us from time’s arrow, everyone and everything that is alive today will inevitably die. It’s a one-way street.

Nor does longevity mean merely notching more and more birthdays as we slowly wither away. This is what happened to a hapless mythical Greek named Tithonus, who asked the gods for eternal life. To his joy, the gods granted his wish. But because he forgot to ask for eternal youth as well, his body continued to decay. Oops.

Most of my patients instinctively get this. When they first come to see me, they generally insist that they don’t want to live longer, if doing so means lingering on in a state of ever-declining health. Many of them have watched their parents or grandparents endure such a fate, still alive but crippled by physical frailty or dementia. They have no desire to reenact their parents’ suffering. Here’s where I stop them. Just because your parents endured a painful old age, or died younger than they should have, I say, does not mean that you must do the same. The past need not dictate the future. Your longevity is more malleable than you think.

In 1900, life expectancy hovered somewhere south of age fifty, and most people were likely to die from “fast” causes of death: accidents, injuries, and infectious diseases of various kinds. Since then, slow death has supplanted fast death. The majority of people reading this book can expect to die somewhere in their seventies or eighties, give or take, and almost all from “slow” causes. Assuming that you’re not someone who engages in ultrarisky behaviors like base jumping, motorcycle racing, or texting and driving, the odds are overwhelming that you will die as a result of one of the chronic diseases of aging that I call the Four Horsemen: heart disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disease, or type 2 diabetes and related metabolic dysfunction. To achieve longevity—to live longer and live better for longer—we must understand and confront these causes of slow death.

Longevity has two components. The first is how long you live, your chronological lifespan, but the second and equally important part is how well you live—the quality of your years. This is called healthspan, and it is what Tithonus forgot to ask for. Healthspan is typically defined as the period of life when we are free from disability or disease, but I find this too simplistic, too binary. For example, I’m as free from “disability and disease” as when I was a twenty-five-year-old medical student, but my twenty-something self could run circles around fifty-year-old me, both physically and mentally. That’s just a fact. Thus the second part of our plan for longevity is to maintain and improve our physical and mental function.

The key question is, Where am I headed from here? What’s my future trajectory? Already, in midlife, the warning signs abound. I’ve been to funerals for friends from high school, reflecting the steep rise in mortality risk that begins in middle age. At the same time, many of us in our thirties, forties, and fifties are watching our parents disappear down the road to physical disability, dementia, or long-term disease. This is always sad to see, and it reinforces one of my core principles, which is that the only way to create a better future for yourself—to set yourself on a better trajectory—is to start thinking about it and taking action now.