The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [465]
When someone he knew better called, he struggled to talk about a subject that formerly he would have avoided at all costs.
“Oh, hi, Chuck. Yeah. Well, she’s doing better in every respect than people have told us would be the case going in. She doesn’t have any energy and it’s—it’s been an experience like she hasn’t had before. But in terms of her mouth healing, in terms of swallowing—everything, it’s all going fine. And the people are terrific. Not a lot of pain right now. I think it’s psychological more than—I mean, she’s not finding life any fun at all at the moment but.
“The annual meeting? Well, I would say this, now with Susie’s condition the way it is, I think we’re going to skip the music and just—there’s no way she’ll be singing in this May’s meeting, so let’s see what happens next year.”
From time to time he still talked about Susie being able to sing again, even though that wasn’t going to happen. And only with people with whom he was very close, such as his daughter, would he drop the occasional hint that he needed help.
“Hello? Hi. I feel fine. I’m getting two hours of sleep every night. Oh, great. Why don’t you come down and swap cars with me? Oh yeah, there’s a ham to pick up, incidentally too. It’s here…. We will. Maybe tomorrow or something. Okay. Okay? Okay.”
Two hours’ sleep a night.
“If I’m thinking about something I’m not going to sleep. I slept two hours last night, actually, and I feel fine. It doesn’t kill me not to sleep. Susie’s going through this thing again about whether she wants the radiation.
“We’ll get over it. Her inclination over this was going in a worse direction when I left San Francisco but it’s still better than it was when I got there. So.
“The only good thing about Susie having the operation is that this is the first year, in thirty-odd years, that I won’t go to Emerald Bay for Christmas. I’m not even sure my house is there anymore.”
59
Winter
Omaha and San Francisco • December 2003–January 2004
Susie was still resisting the idea of radiation, so anxious about it that she was taking a lot of Ativan. And “Dr. Isley started giving me little Ativan speeches,” said Susie Jr., “about how I needed to stop asking for so much Ativan for her. But she was very agitated about the radiation.”
Warren’s view was that it was a form of handicapping: If radiation improved your odds, why not do it? The surgery, he told her, was the hard part. The radiation wouldn’t be nearly as hard. But the radiation oncologist had told Susie, if anyone tells you about their radiation and says it’s not that bad, don’t believe them. Radiation in your mouth is not like any other radiation. Everything will taste like metal. Your whole mouth will be burned. Your salivary glands will be damaged or destroyed. You may lose all your taste buds. There will be a lot of pain. Susie had already had a lot of pain. She felt she had the right to refuse more pain.
“She’s seen a lot of people die, seen people go through more than they needed to go through. We both want control over the end of life. She has no fear of death, but somehow she got the idea that by having radiation, she would lose control and that radiation would increase the chances of a terrible end. We went on for hours and hours, around and around. It’s up to her to decide what to do. But on the other hand, nothing makes sense right now. She keeps saying, ‘I know my brain isn’t working right.’ And she’s had these two doctors prepare her for sort of a worst-case scenario, in the nicest way, but just because they’d rather do it that way.”
To calm her anxiety, every night she went through a bedtime ritual centered around a song by the singer Bono, who had befriended Susie Jr. after meeting Warren at a NetJets event. Now Susie put on U2’s Rattle and Hum DVD when she was going to bed and fell asleep to “All I Want Is You.”
“All the promises we break
From the cradle