Decisions for life | Talat Kırış | TEDxIstanbul

"No choice should have higher priority than our lives, including our own decisions," said Professor. Dr. Talat Kırış, inspiring us to take control of our lives with his own real experiences and the lives of his patients.

He was born in 1961 in Istanbul. He graduated from Istanbul University Faculty of Medicine in 1986, completed his compulsory service in Konya State Hospital. In 1992, he became a neurosurgery specialist at Istanbul University Faculty of Medicine and in 1995-96 he did specialization in cerebrovascular diseases and cranial base tumors in Barrow Neurology Institute in the USA. He also served in hospitals such as Sheffield Royal Hallamshire Hospital, Edinburgh West General Hospital, Kartal Emergency Traffic and First Aid Hospital, the German Hospital. He served as the chairman of the Turkish Neurosurgical Society's Vascular Surgery, Neuro Oncologic Surgery Groups and Basic Training Courses and currently serves as a board member of the same association. He is a member of the Research Commission of the Federation of European Neurosurgical Societies. Since 2012, he is the Head of Neurosurgery Department at Florence Nightingale Hospitals. He is the editor of two international books published in English and close to 100 scientific articles in national and international sources. Talat Kırış is one of the world's leading professors in neurosurgery.

Besides his medical articles, he has published stories and essays. He is an amateur sailor and columnist at Yacht Turkey Magazine.

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences.

Hello.

As I am the last speaker today,

I think I have the privilege
to speak as much as I want.

I assume you are already feeling tired
and thinking it’s time to leave.

Let me tell you from the beginning
that I will save my best bit till the end.

(Laughter)

I am a brain surgeon.

This is my office.

I have one of the most
challenging jobs on earth.

What would you think
is the most challenging part of my job?

Working for long hours
under this microscope?

Or the risk to lose a life
or leave a patient disabled

with a minor mistake I make?

That’s definitely not
the most challenging part.

But meeting with people

who've learned that they have
a brain tumor in their head

or whose lives go upside down
with a rupture of a brain aneurysm

and have cerebral hemorrhage.

The hardest part of my job

is to have a face-to-face
conversation with a mother

who has just learned that there is
a tumor in her kid’s cerebellum

and to try to explain her the situation.

I don’t see my patients as cases.

I see them as a whole

with their feelings,
opinions, loved ones and jobs.

I think about how the disease
they’ve been trapped in will affect them

and how I can help them out.

Today I will tell you
about moments and choices.

Momentum reminds me of a moment,

I mean a moment of time
and then an action.

The most distinct feature
of motion is its direction.

When a truck is moving on a straight line
on a highway, it is not a problem.

But when the driver turns
the wheel towards the barriers,

then we get a problem.

The direction of the action
marks the choice.

Humans are defined
by their moments and choices.

What is a moment?

A minute? Ten minutes?

If a moment is a minute,

then you have 25 million moments
in your whole lifetime

excluding the time you invest in sleep.

If it's ten minutes,
you have 2.5 million moments.

Of course, this is true for any newborn.

I mean, we don’t have much time.

Because of this, our moments
and choices gain importance.

I’ll give you examples of moments -

examples from choices from my patients,
from myself and from other people.

There’s this young man at the age of 17.

He has many problems, like most of us.

And he’s also in love.

He wants to talk to the girl who he loves,

and he is determined
to talk to her that day.

He keeps texting her but gets no replies.

He calls her this time, again no reply.

Then he calls her again,
and his call gets suspended.

He goes to the living room,

opens the window
and jumps into the void.

No, he doesn’t die.

He becomes paraplegic.

He will spend the rest
of his life in a wheel chair

with all his problems remaining the same.

No choice should be made against life,

including the choices on our life,

since there’s only
one sacred thing on this earth,

which is life.

This holds true for all the children
who die from hunger in Africa

or in a bombardment in the Middle East.

It holds true for the dolphins
slaughtered at the Faroe islands

as wells as the dogs
poisoned to death by municipalities.

It also holds true for the trees
chopped to build a mall in Gezi Park,

chopped to build a mosque in Validebağ

or chopped for a power plant in Soma.

(Applause)

By the way, dear ladies and gentlemen,

please do not forget to reply
to the texts from your loved ones

as long as the text you received
doesn't include harsh words.

I’ve had so many patients
who have jumped into the void.

Another of my patients
is a woman at the age of 29.

She was married,

had a happy marriage and a good job.

She was having headaches.

She got an MRI, and a big
vascular lump was found.

She came to me.

I began to inform her about her condition,

that she had had the lump since birth

and it could stay there
doing no harm until the end of her life.

She suddenly took the words
out of my mouth and said,

"But it might also bleed
tomorrow and I might die."

For a while now,

patients have been researching
their illnesses on the Internet.

They research me too.
They know almost everything about me.

She said, "They say you’re good
at this kind of surgery. Save me."

I told her the risks of the operation,
including disabilities and death.

She said, "I want the operation."

The operation took 20 hours.

She came out of the operation
with both legs and one arm paralyzed.

And then she gave me the best gift
I’ve ever got from a patient:

this postcard.

It pictures her and her husband.

On the back side, it says,

January 2002, the diagnosis;
April 2002, the operation;

August 2002, 3200 meters high
on Mount Kaçkar.

She made a choice,

and I am so happy that I
could give her a life she wished for.

The next story is a bit more touching.

A man in his mid-30s
had an epileptic attack.

They took him to the ER.
He got an MRI scan.

A big tumor in the right
hemisphere of the brain.

He came to me.

With a bitter smile on his face, he asked,
"Doc, you think I can survive?"

It was a malignant one.

I said, "We both will fight against it."

I operated on him
three times in two years.

One day, he called me.

He said,

"Doc, I lived the last two years well.
I did everything I dreamed of.

I had fantasies and realized them all.

I enjoyed 40-50 years in only two years."

He died a week later.

Should it have been like that?

Do we have to crashed into a wall

before we understand
the value of our lives?

We come out from a cubicle called home

to go to another cubicle called work
every single morning.

We keep wasting a lifetime

while our imagination
and creativity fade away.

We strive hard to earn more,
get higher social status

and become more powerful.

Yet does being powerful
help us to get more decent?

Most of the time, it makes us worse.

We become more alienated

from our surroundings
and the planet we live on.

When was the last time
you had a look at a world map?

How many of you have ever
dreamed of going to the poles

or going down a trench on a submarine?

If you didn’t,

then how would your children
dream of going to Jupiter or Uranus?

How would our children
growing up in this land do so?

I’ll give you two examples
of two mariners.

I am a sailor myself too.

Two great female sailors.

The first one is Jean Socrates,

a retired math teacher at the age of 70.

She and her husband learned
how to sail after the age of 50.

They sold their house and bought
a sailboat to travel around the world.

They named it Nereida.

But her husband died because of cancer.

This 70-year-old woman took the challenge

and decided to travel around the world
nonstop on the most challenging route.

Very few people had managed to do so.

She set off.

She tried to complete her journey
but had to stop on the way.

So she could not achieve her goal,
but she set off again.

She needed to stop once again,
only 60 miles before the finish line.

She set off again,

and finally she became the oldest person
and one of the few people

that sailed nonstop around the world.

Another great sailor, Ellen MacArthur.

She has a petite figure
and is 152 cm tall.

She joined one of the toughest
sport competitions in the world,

called Vendée Globe.

She fought off

the 10-15-metre-high waves
of the Southern Ocean

on a 60-foot sailboat for 94 days,

and finished the competition
in second place.

Three years later,

she became the fastest person on earth

to sail around the world with a trimaran.

Both of these great women

are now fighting off cancer
with the associations they founded

as they keep sailing at the same time.

They have become role-models

and a source of inspiration
for the children in their countries.

I now remember a year ago.

One of my patients
was having a brain hemorrhage.

She was in the operation room
two hours later.

This video is an episode
from her operation.

Soon, I will experience the worst thing
a brain surgeon can ever experience.

We call it a premature rupture.

Before I got to explore
the anatomy of the patient,

the aneurysm burst.

The blood which should flow to the brain

was coming out with such a great pressure

that it was like water
coming out of a hose.

If I could not have stopped
the bleeding in couple of minutes,

I’d have lost the patient.

Seconds were running by
and my coronary arteries shriveled up.

But it’s my job.

I’d done hundreds of operations
like this in the past 25 years.

I knew how to stop this bleeding.

I clipped the aneurysm.

I saved the patient’s life.

I am a surgeon
who is in love with his job.

I am a surgeon who does his job well.

I have been doing
what I was dreaming of as a kid.

I’ve educated a lot
of residents and students.

I have written books,

and I am well-known
both nationwide and worldwide.

Yet it started to feel inadequate
to have only one dimension in my life,

to get stuck in neurosurgery.

After that operation, I went to Taksim.

It was June.

The Gezi Park protests have inspired
its participants in many different ways.

And for me,

it made me think that we live
on a planet called Earth.

I was here two months after.

East Greenland, Angmagssalik region.

An Eskimo village called Kulusuk.

My goal was to pass through
the Arctic Circle in a kayak.

I’d never rode in a kayak before.

I’d never paddled.

We sailed to the Greenland sea,

and I was with people
I didn’t know at all.

We started to paddle
in the direction of the Arctic Circle,

which was 100 km away.

I stayed in a tent on Greenland.

I had not stayed in a tent
for the past 30 years.

I went to the toilet
watching out for polar bears.

I never washed for eight days.

I mean, these were not very common things

for a 50-year-old medical professor

who was used to the modern urban life.

But in the end, I did it;
I passed through the Arctic Circle.

And here I was after three months:

Antarctica.

From Ushuaia -

(Applause)

Well, I’ll travel more

if I keep getting
these rounds of applause.

(Laughter)

We got onto this sailboat in Ushuaia,

the southernmost city on Earth,

and sailed to the Drake Passage.

With eight more people;
people who I didn’t know at all.

The Drake Passage
is one of the toughest on earth.

It’s between South America and Antarctica
and rough for 300 days a year.

You get to this magnificent place
after you cross the Drake Passage.

Antarctica.

You feel like you have arrived
on a different planet.

The best part of Antarctica
is that no one owns it.

No countries or
multinationals possess it.

Nobody tries to exploit
its natural resources.

Antarctica only belongs
to the creatures that live there.

I stayed in Antarctica for a month.

I said goodbye to the penguins
on my way back home.

(Applause)

I also didn’t forget to ask them,

"What's with all these
documentaries of yours

shown on all TV channels
at the time of Gezi Park Protests

instead of showing the activists?"

I am quoting you their response:

"Dude, we live up here,

so we don’t care whether they
build a mall in Taksim square or not.

They filmed us with a candid camera

and showed it on TV
without asking our permission.

Our whole life has been exposed,

whether it's the birth
of our kids or our sex life.

As you can see, we’re black
and white from birth.

We would have showed up
in Gezi with the Çarşı Group

if we had been in İstanbul then."

(Applause)

It would have been a nice scene, indeed,

to march to Gezi cheering
with a large group of penguins.

On my way home from Antarctica,

one of the best things
in my life happened.

First we saw the spouts.

It was a group of big humpback whales.

We lowered the sails and waited.

They started to near us one by one,

and soon the whole boat was surrounded
by twenty or so humpback whales.

Sounds scary?

Not at all, they started
to play with us like kids.

They dived on one side of the boat

and came to the surface on another
in the middle of the vast ocean.

They showed their flukes
and blew water out on our faces.

Even a pet will be bothered
when a visitor shows up at home.

Yet these whales taught us a lesson
of the friendship of all living creatures

in the middle of the ocean.

Then I went back to my operating room.

I was doing the surgeries
much more passionately than before.

I examined my patients,
but I was not who I used to be.

When one travels in the waters
of Greenland and Antarctica,

one don’t stay the same person.

While I was working,

I was also thinking about
walking to the South Pole

and swimming with the whales in Tongo.

You might ask if it isn’t dangerous.

It is.

But trust me, urban life is no less.

Especially if you live in Turkey,
Antarctica is much safer for sure.

(Laughter)

We have only one life.

Only one.

We don’t know what’s afterwards.

We were born into this life
and will live through it.

Change your lives.

Start making changes from tomorrow on.

Dream.

Dream big and what seems impossible.

Dream the toughest.

Dream of climbing
the Everest, and plan it.

Maybe one day, you will climb Mount Ağrı.

Not bad, ain’t it?

Dream of sailing to the Mediterranean
and head for the oceans.

Maybe one day you get a fisherman boat
and live on the sea in Istanbul.

Not bad, ain’t it?

Touch your life tomorrow.

Stop being the audience
and come to the stage.

Be the actors and actresses
of your own life, not the audience.

Be the playwright
and the director of your life.

Touch your life.

When one changes, everyone changes.

Humans are defined
by their moments and choices.

Let your choices follow your dreams.

Never forget!

Always remember the Lapon sailors.

The Lapon sailors never came back

after they set to the Arctic Ocean
after their red-eyed deer.

And never thought of coming back.

(Applause)