'Having less than three months to live, your perspective of time warps'

What happens when you ask ChatGPT about the devastating news you've received from your doctor? Here, Dan Fine explains what it feels like to be told that your time is limited

- Dan Fine

ChatGPT has given me between 30 and 90 days to live. That was 20 days ago. Pretty bold of it, considering AI will probably live forever. I, on the other hand, have been living on borrowed time for a year and a half since my diagnosis: stage 4 pancreatic cancer.

On my 65th birthday, I was feeling pretty good about myself. I had started going to the gym five days a week and cut out wine (bar one cheat glass a week). I had lost 20lb and people were noticing, especially my wife.

When I started getting pains in my back and abdomen, I thought it was from all the exercise, especially those squats and lunges. Now that my body was looking better, I also started glancing at the mirror more often and noticed some bumps growing on my left shoulder. The weight and body aches I could blame on the gym, but these bumps? I was curious.

I set up an appointment with the doctor, and when he asked about my weight, I proudly told him of my recent dedication to fitness. Had I had any back or leg pain? Yep, those lunges, sit-ups and squats were working. He sent me to the lab that afternoon for a blood test, an ultrasound and then a CT scan the following day. The radiologist called me into his office, where I was told I had pancreatic cancer.

I’ve always known that I had a pancreas. I had no idea what it did. I kept ChatGPT busier than a beaver in a hurricane, looking at my blood report, scan and finding out if pancreatic cancer was a serious type. One thing ChatGPT told me was that Eric Idle from Monty Python once joked with his doctor that he needed to kill off a character quickly. The doctor quipped, “Pancreatic cancer.” Years later, Idle himself was diagnosed with it - and laughed at the morbid irony.