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Rod Nordland views Istanbul’s old city from the Galata Tower on November 20, 2016. Nordland was diagnosed with glioblastoma, a terminal brain cancer, in 2019.
Yasin Akgul/AFP via Getty Images
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Yasin Akgul/AFP via Getty Images
Rod Nordland views Istanbul’s old city from the Galata Tower on November 20, 2016. Nordland was diagnosed with glioblastoma, a terminal brain cancer, in 2019.
Yasin Akgul/AFP via Getty Images
As a war correspondent The New York Times, news week and the Philadelphia researcher, Rod Nordland faced death many times. He has felt bullets whistling past his head in Cambodia, and once escaped from a hotel room in Sarajevo moments before a mortar attack reduced his bed to rubble.
But in 2019, Nordland faced a different kind of danger when she was diagnosed with glioblastoma, the deadliest form of brain tumor.
The average life expectancy of a person with glioblastoma is approximately 14 months. less than 7% of people survive five years. Nordland says his time as a war correspondent helped him prepare for his cancer diagnosis.
“One of the most important things I learned as a war correspondent was… to stay calm and not lose control of your emotions,” he says. “And I think it’s also been a very good lesson in dealing with cancer.”
Optimistic by nature, Nordland acknowledges that she has already beaten the odds by living with glioblastoma for so long. She actively participates in the treatment, but also recognizes that there is no cure for this type of cancer.
“I had to face the reality that my death occurred in a fairly short period of time, very likely,” he says. “That’s never been the case before. And I think that made me a better person.”
Nordland writes about facing mortality from war and cancer in her new memoir, Waiting for the monsoon.
Interview Highlights
Waiting for the monsoonby Rod Nordland
HarperCollins
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HarperCollins
Waiting for the monsoonby Rod Nordland
HarperCollins
About your current treatments for glioblastoma
I am receiving low dose chemotherapy and also wear a device on my head called Optune. It’s a series of ceramic matrices that stick to my head after I shave it. And then they emit electronic rays that are believed to fight tumors. …So about every three days I have to shave my head and then reapply the matrices. And I have to make sure the Optune machine is close to me. So it often means having someone else carry it for me if I move it or put it in a backpack or the back of my wheelchair. That’s a bit annoying and certainly restricts my movement a lot.
About the side effects of the treatments.
I use a wheelchair when I go to appointments, doctor’s appointments, just for safety reasons. Because although I can walk with a cane sometimes without a cane, I am very prone to falling and tripping because… when the doctor removed the tumor, he also cut some nerves that gave sensation to my left side. So I have no feeling in my left, which causes a lot of mobility problems. It gives you what they call poor proprioception, which is a fancy word, meaning your brain’s knowledge of where your body is in space. And if your brain doesn’t know where your body parts are, you’re obviously very prone to falls, which in my case are bad for my head. [and] can be fatal.
On being a war correspondent
When I started working as a war correspondent, I was still in my twenties and, in many ways, still a teenager. Like many young people, I didn’t really believe in my own mortality. And I think that’s true for a lot of people who do that kind of work because otherwise who would do it? Who would jump from a plane to a parachute if he didn’t believe in his own immortality? So I deeply lost that arrogance when I was on the front lines against my own rules in Cambodia, on the outskirts of a refugee camp where there was a nasty little internal war between the factions that ran the camp and lived off the profits. of the food and supplies they could steal. … I was shoulder to shoulder with one of these militiamen and the bullets were whistling over our heads. …And we just stood there like idiots. And one of those bullets hit the guy next to me and literally blew his brains out.
… After that, I started doing it really differently. That taught me that I was, in fact, mortal, which is an important lesson that all young people should learn as soon as possible. And after that, I never went back to the front again.
About the meaning of life
I asked everyone I met what the meaning of life was. I even asked Alexa. The answer was, quoting Eleanor Roosevelt, that “the purpose of life is to live life to the fullest and enjoy everything connected with it.” That’s a bit of a silly answer. But I once asked a nurse that question and she turned it around and said, “What do you think the meaning of life is?” So I said, “Well, I’m sorry, I’m going to have to bet on that. But I think the meaning of life is, as Raymond Carver said, ‘to feel loved on this earth.'” Was my answer then. And it’s also my answer in the book.
Sam Briger and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Seth Kelley and Carmel Wroth adapted it for the web.