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)