Neurologist Oliver Sacks has terminal liver cancer

NEW YORK -- Famed neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks is fighting terminal cancer.

Sacks, the author of several books on brain conditions including "Awakenings" and "Musicophilia: Tales of Music and The Brain," disclosed his diagnosis in an op-ed Thursday in the New York Times titled "My Own Life."

The 81-year-old said a rare eye tumor that left him blind in one eye nine years ago has metastasized and now occupies a third of his liver.

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"It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me," Sacks wrote. "I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can."

Sacks cited the essay, also called "My Own Life," that philosopher David Hume wrote in 1776 when he learned of his own terminal illness.

"I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution," Hume wrote. "I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment's abatement of my spirits. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company."

Sacks echoed Hume's sentiments, calling his life "equally rich in work and love." He said in addition to his five previous books, his autobiography will be published this spring and several other books are nearing completion.

"And yet, one line from Hume's essay strikes me as especially true," Sacks wrote. "'It is difficult,' [Hume] wrote, 'to be more detached from life than I am at present.'" Sacks said he has also recently felt an ability "to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts."

However, "This does not mean I am finished with life," he said.

"On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight," Sacks wrote.

"I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude," Sacks concluded. "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."