Inspiring guy

[Yippee38]

You guys may have seen this already, but I thought it was pretty cool. This guy is dying of cancer. He has 2-5 months of fairly normal life left before it gets bad. He's a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and they happen to have a lecture series where the premise is, "Suppose you were dying and could only give your students one last lecture." This is his. It's pretty cool advice on life, but the guy is amazingly okay with his own imminent death.

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/LastLecture/

Stop the ad for the interview that plays right away and scroll down to the bottom to see the whole interview (in four parts). It's about an hour long.

 

[J-Dubya 777]

Wow....incredible. Stuck @ work for a LONG night, can't wait to see the whole thing. I don't know if I could do that...

 

[Ruthven]

Not only is Professor Pausch inspiring, but he is bringing out the best in others. Jay Abrams is making a new "Star Trek" movie, and wrote to Pausch, asking him if he wanted a cameo. I'm not a Trek fan, but that is an amazingly cool thing to do for a fan. Pausch's lecture is a model of how to stand up and go out with dignity.

Speaking of inspiring people, I'll also give a shout out to author and musician Shawn Decker, a cool guy I met last year. He is a hemophiliac who contracted HIV at the age of 11 due to a tainted blood transfusion. Doctors told his family that Shawn wouldn't live to the age of 14, and he is now 32. He has lasted this long by laughing at life. He's one of the most upbeat people I've met in a long time.

 

[kellsco]

I watched the story about him last night on ABC...truly awe inspiring.

There is a part in this home movie that they showed...it was him with his child at the beach. He was holding the child up in the air with one hand-the kid is basically standing on his hand in the air-and after all that I had heard him say, and all that was said about him...seeing that moment, I found myself looking at the video as through his child's eyes and teared up a little at how proud his kid is gonna be when he is old enough to understand what a remarkable man their Dad was.

 

[BABS]

He is very inspiring. I wish I had the guts to give the book to my sister-in-law. She's been battling ovarian cancer for 2+ years now, been on an experimental drug that has caused more damage, and she's just made the choice to stop treatment. My brother is a wreck over all of this and I don't know how to approach her and say "Come on you're stronger than this." I'm not her, don't know what it's like to be in her body every day, etc.

I hope this Randy Pausch inspires people and I hope he gives all the docs a run for their money.

 

[jaimek]

I'm tempted to send this to my mother - she's had a-fib for a while and has recovered from breast cancer (stage 1a - very small tumor; now in the middle of that five year "waiting period" after chemo/radiation to see if it comes back), and her attitude has been distressingly fatalistic. I certainly cannot blame her, but to paraphrase Pausch, anger and depression never made anything better.

At least she quit smoking, FINALLY, after almost thirty years of me crabbing at her and over twenty years of husband and other kid crabbing at her.