Lee Lipsenthal - Enjoy Every Sandwich: Living Each Day as If It Were Your Last

A remarkable and unprecedented perspective on life from a doctor living mindfully, adventurously, and even happily with cancer. Lee Lipsenthal lets it all hang out here, and his observations offer us many insights on all the important things in life. Every story, every facet of this healing journey hits home. Rich, heartfelt, and moving. A must-read.

Martin Rossman, M.D., author of Guided Imagery for Self-Healing and The Worry Solution

If you want to learn to love with your whole heart, so that when you come to the end of your life you will have no regrets, Lee Lipsenthals gracious and caring book is for you. In revealing his own struggles, and doing so with remarkable transparency and responsibility, Lee has not just written a book that is filled with grounded inspiration and hard-earned wisdom. He has written a book that you will never forget.

John Robbins, author of Diet for a New America, Healthy at 100, and The New Good Life

Faced with cancerand knowing as a physician all too well what his odds areLee Lipsenthal does something extraordinary: he digs deep to find wellsprings of humor, gratitude, grit, and inspiration that all of us can use both for our own challenges and for simply living with a newfound joy.

Rick Hanson, Ph.D., author of Buddhas Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

A heartfelt, inspirational memoir that radiates the hope and courage to overcome adversity. Lee is a physician who understands the necessity of becoming whole and healthy by combining spirituality and science.

Mitchell Gaynor, M.D., founder and president of Gaynor Integrative Oncology

Lee Lipsenthal has written a truly beautiful and deeply personal book about living with a life-threatening illness. I highly recommend this physicians account of his Hippocratic life journey into healing himself to all who seek healing and health.

Michael Lerner, president of Commonweal, cofounder of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program

Enjoy Every Sandwich is a deeply inspiring story of a doctors response to news about his mortality. Dr. Lipsenthal, using narrative style, shares his engagement with the deepest and most painful of all human emotionsanxietyand how he has managed his and his familys response to this unexpected and premature challenge. With grace, warmth, humor, and vulnerability, this stricken author encourages and guides the reader to embrace life each moment irrespective of what may be happening. I recommend this book not only to the millions for whom it is personally relevant but for its challenge to all of us to see life as a gift and gratitude as the only appropriate attitude.

Harville Hendrix, Ph.D., author of Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples

Enjoy Every Sandwich by Lee Lipsenthal is a book of heartfulness and wisdom. It is an impressive blend of personal memoir, rich psychological insight, and science. I have been enriched reading it as will anyone else smart enough to do so.

Frederic Luskin, Ph.D., author of Forgive for Good

This is an amazing, life-affirming, even life-changing book by a man who has learned one of the most difficult of all lessons: how to be himself. In facing the very real threat of his death with utter honesty, deep insight and wisdom, and remarkable humor, Lee Lipsenthal teaches us to appreciate the mystery and glory of our own lives.

James S. Gordon, M.D., author of Unstuck: Your Guide to the Seven Stage Journey out of Depression, founder and director of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine

At once playful and profound, Enjoy Every Sandwich serves up a delicious double-decker. Lee gifts us with gracious guidelines not only for those facing death but for everyone seeking to live life to the fullest. Should be required reading for all!

Donald Abrams, M.D., author of Integrative Oncology, chief of Hematology/Oncology at San Francisco General Hospital

This book should be read by every doctor and patientit is life transforming and affirming. Lee Lipsenthal transitions from doctor to patient to true healer in telling his own journey through cancer and into the deepest acceptance and ease with dying. This is a journey each of us should embrace in our lifetime, and Lees book is a remarkable guide.

Stephan Rechtschaffen, M.D., founder of Blue Spirit Costa Rica and Omega Institute, author of Timeshifting

Filled with wisdom, Enjoy Every Sandwich reminds us what is really important in life. Dr. Lipsenthal takes us on a journey filled with hope, fear, tough choices, and, most important, love. He reminds us of lifes essential ingredients and challenges us to awake to our full potential before it is too late. Thank you, Dr. Lipsenthal, for touching my heart and awakening my soul.

Mimi Guarneri, M.D., FACC, medical director and founder of Scripps Center for Integrative Medicine, author of The Heart Speaks

Copyright 2011 by Lee Lipsenthal
Foreword copyright 2011 by Dean Ornish, M.D.

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN ARCHETYPE with colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lipsenthal, Lee.
Enjoy every sandwich : living each day as if it were your last / Lee Lipsenthal.1st ed.
p. cm.
1. CancerPatientsUnited StatesBiography. 2. PhysiciansUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.

RC265.6.L57A3 2012
362.1969940092dc23
[B]
2011026426

eISBN: 978-0-307-95516-6

Jacket design by Jessie Sayward Bright
Jacket photography by Rikki Cooke

v3.1

To

my friends and family

who have made this journey worthwhile
and for those who have kept me alive
while on that journey.

And, most of all, to

Kathy

who has been with me through every
difficult step of the past thirty years,
who has held me every night,
and whose love transcends
her need for privacy.
Thanks for letting me tell our story.

Imagine the unthinkable: Youre a well-known, prominent physician, you have a loving wife and two beautiful kids, and youve made a meaningful difference in the lives of many thousands of people. Your only major unfulfilled desire is to be a rock star, and youre working on that one, too.

In a heartbeat, your life is turned upside down: your doctor just told you that you have metastatic cancer and you probably have less than a year to live.

We all know were going to die one day; the mortality rate is still 100 percent, one per person. But its not something we think about very often unless weve had a brush with a life-threatening illness or know someone who has. Even then, though, the awareness of our mortality is hard to hold on to.

For example, people who have recently had a heart attack will do just about anything that their doctor or nurse recommendschange their diet, exercise, quit smoking, etc.for about six weeks or so, and then they tend to go back to their old habits and patterns of living. Because its just too terrifying for most people to come to terms with their mortality.

And yet, a fundamental part of many spiritual traditions is a wonderful paradox: to the degree we can embrace our mortality rather than deny it, we can live that much more completely and joyfully. When something profoundly shakes your worldviewlike finding out that you have cancer and only a year to liveit radically alters the preconceptions and paradigms of your life.