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Home » Anita Moorjani on Dying To Be Me at TEDxBayArea (Full Transcript)

Anita Moorjani on Dying To Be Me at TEDxBayArea (Full Transcript)

Anita Moorjani

New York Times best-selling author Anita Moorjani speaks on Dying To Be Me at TEDxBayArea. Below is the full transcript.

Listen to the MP3 Audio here: Dying to be me! Anita Moorjani at TEDxBayArea

TRANSCRIPT: 

It’s such a thrill for me to be here. And I’m so happy to see all of you.

You know, one of the biggest reasons that I’m happy to be here is because I shouldn’t be alive today. I should have died on February 2, 2006. That was supposed to be my last day here, in this physical life, because on that day, the doctors had told my husband and my family that I only had a few more hours to live.

I was dying from end-stage lymphoma, which is a form of cancer of the lymph nodes. I had struggled with cancer for four years up to that point. For four years, this disease had devoured my body. It had traveled through my lymphatic system. It started with a lump in my neck, and then, it spread throughout my lymphatic system and by that point, by the end of four years, I had tumors, some of them the size of lemons that had spread from the base of my skull all around my neck, down into my chest, under my arms, and all the way to my abdomen.

By that point also, even before I had gone into the coma, my lungs had been filled with fluid, and every time I would lie down, I would choke on my own fluid. My muscles had completely deteriorated so I weighed about 85 pounds. I looked like just a skeleton with skin on.

I had these big gaping-opened skin lesions where the toxins were oozing out of my body. I wasn’t able to digest any food.