Often people expect I have some touching personal story about kidney disease, but it's actually the mathematics that led me to it.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
A mathematical proof is beautiful, but when you're finished, it's really only about one thing. A story can be about many things.
I'm a prime example of the way kidney disease strikes silently.
I was pretty bad. When I first was diagnosed with kidney failure, my function - the function of my kidney was less than 8 percent.
I was diagnosed with hypertension when I was 24, and I battled hypertension for about 10 to 12 years, and then I went to the doctor for something else, and he found that I had high levels of protein in my urine, and that's how I found out I had kidney disease.
If you enjoy math and you write novels, it's very rare that you'll get a chance to put your math into a novel. I leapt at the chance.
There's nothing mathematical to my writing. It's a feeling.
I won some genetic lottery. I always happened to be strangely good at mathematics in my head. I just popped out weird.
I've always been interested in medicine and was pleased when my brother became a doctor. But after thinking seriously about that field, I realized that what intrigued me was not the science, not the chemistry or biology of medicine, but the narrative - the story of each patient, each illness.
The ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.
I was a healthy young man, and I thought I was invincible before I was diagnosed with kidney disease.