Jordan B. Peterson - Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

On the fifth of February 2020, I awoke in an intensive care ward in, of all places, Moscow. I had six-inch tethers attaching me to the sides of the bed because, in my unconscious state, I had been agitated enough to try to remove the catheters from my arm and leave the ICU. I was confused and frustrated not knowing where I was, surrounded by people speaking a foreign language, and in the absence of my daughter, Mikhaila, and her husband, Andrey, who were restricted to short visiting hours and did not have permission to be there with me at my moment of wakening. I was angry, too, about being there, and lunged at my daughter when she did visit several hours later. I felt betrayed, although that was the furthest from the truth. People had been attending to my various needs with great diligence, and in the wake of the tremendous logistic challenges that come about from seeking medical care in a truly foreign country. I do not have any memory of anything that happened to me during the most recent weeks preceding that, and very little between that moment and my having entered a hospital in Toronto, in mid-December. One of the few things I could recall, looking back to the earliest days of the year, was the time I had spent writing this book.

I wrote much and edited almost all of Beyond Order during a time when my family was plagued by sequential and overlapping bouts of seriously impaired health, much of which was the subject of public discussion, and for that reason requires some detailed explanation. First, in January 2019, Mikhaila had to seek out a surgeon to replace much of her artificial ankle, implanted about a decade earlier, as the initial installation was never perfect, causing her serious pain and trouble with movement as a consequence, and then came near to failing. I spent a week with her at a hospital in Zurich, Switzerland, for the week of that procedure and her initial recovery.

At the beginning of March, my wife, Tammy, underwent routine surgery in Toronto for a common and eminently treatable kidney cancer. A month and a half after that surgery, which involved the removal of one third of the organ in question, we learned that she was actually suffering from an extremely rare malignancy, which had a one-year fatality rate of close to 100 percent.

Two weeks later, the surgeons involved in her care removed the remaining two thirds of her afflicted kidney, along with a substantial proportion of the related abdominal lymphatic system. The surgery appeared to bring the progression of the cancer to a halt, but produced leakage of fluid (up to four liters, or one gallon, a day) from her now-damaged lymphatic systema condition known as chylous asciteswhich rivaled the original condition in danger. We journeyed to see a medical team in Philadelphia, where within ninety-six hours of the initial injection of a poppy seed oil dye, whose practical purpose was the enhancement of images derived from CAT or MRI scans, the complete cessation of Tammys fluid loss was achieved. This breakthrough occurred on the very day of our thirtieth wedding anniversary. She recovered rapidly and, to all appearances, completelya testament to the luck without which none of us can live, and to her own admirable strength and resistance.