Page 193 - Ray Dalio - Principles

So I also had my personal physician, Dr. Glazer, set up visits with four
other experts on this particular disease.

The first call was with the head of thoracic surgery at a major cancer
hospital. She explained that my condition had advanced quickly and
that, contrary to what the first physician said, there was a surgery that
could cure me. It would involve removing both my esophagus and my
stomach and attaching my intestines to the remaining little bit of my
esophagus I’d have left. She estimated I’d have a 10 percent chance of
dying on the operating table and a 70 percent chance of a crippling
outcome. But the odds were in favor of my living, so her
recommendation was clearly worth taking seriously. Naturally I wanted
her to speak with the doctor from Johns Hopkins who originally
diagnosed me and recommended a watch-and-wait approach, so right
then and there I called the other doctor to see what each would say about
the other’s views. This was eye-opening. While the two doctors had told
me completely different things when I met with them in person, when
they were on the phone together, they sought to minimize their
disagreement and make the other look good, putting professional
courtesy ahead of thrashing things out to get at the best answer. Still, the
differences in their views were clear, and listening to them deepened my
understanding.

The next day I met with a third doctor who was a world-renowned
specialist and researcher at another esteemed hospital. He told me that
my condition would basically cause me no problems so long as I came
in for an endoscopic examination every three months. He explained that
it was like skin cancer but on the inside—if it was watched and any new
growth was clipped before it metastasized into the bloodstream, I’d be
okay. According to him, the results for patients monitored in this way
were no different than for those who had their esophagus removed. To
put that plainly: They didn’t die from cancer. Life went on as normal for
them except for those occasional examinations and procedures.

To recap: Over the course of forty-eight hours, I had gone from a
likely death sentence to a likely cure that would essentially involve
disemboweling me, and then finally to a simple, and only slightly
inconvenient, way of watching for abnormalities and removing them
before they could cause any harm. Was this doctor wrong?

Dr. Glazer and I went on to meet two other world-class specialists
and they both agreed that undergoing the scoping procedure would do
no harm, so I decided to go ahead with it. During the procedure, they
clipped some tissue from my esophagus and sent it to the laboratory for
testing. A few days after the procedure, exactly a week before my sixty-
fourth birthday, I got the results. They were shocking to say the least.