The latest episode of "The Patient from Hell" features a conversation with David Moriah, a “Stage IV” cancer patient and outdoor enthusiast, who talks about living a life of adventure. David shares about his early days as an Outward Bound instructor, his contributions to the Cornell University Outdoor Education Program and the life lessons he has learned from “sleeping in the mud and swatting mosquitoes.” He talks about how mindset and faith have helped him through his cancer experience, which he refers to as “fighting the blue meanies.”

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Key Highlights:

About our guest:

David Moriah has lived 72 abundantly blessed years and is fiercely determined to extend the streak in the face of a “stage 4, incurable” diagnosis. He is a husband of 48 years, a father of two and a grandfather of two and a half. That’s more important than what he’s done for a living. As for that, he spent his 20s as a wilderness instructor for Outward Bound and is the founding director of Cornell University’s outdoor education program. He hosts a blog at CaringBridge, “Adventures in ChemoLand”, and he is a passionate advocate for staying fit while undergoing treatment, and looking out for “God Winks”, those moments of joy and reassurance that we are not alone in this sometimes scary and foreboding journey. 

Key Moments:

5 minutes: On the leadership lesson he learned on his outdoor adventure. “I knew that what I needed to do was hop from rock to rock to get across the river. And so I proceeded to dance across the rocks, attempting to impress my charges with how athletic I was. And immediately, my team started falling off the rocks into the stream, left and right. I was standing on the other shore watching this and it's a leadership lesson that I never forgot. My job is not to look good and impress people. What I need to do is equip and empower my people to be able to do it themselves.”

29 minutes: On the idea of competition vs. team work. “There is an element in advanced mountaineering when you're in the Himalayas and you're climbing Everest or K2 where not everybody summits. Not everybody summits, but you want everybody to succeed. The success of the expedition goes across the entire team. But if you think of it as everyone succeeds rather than everyone summits, the idea is not that we come back and somebody won and everybody else lost, but that everybody achieved to the best of their ability."

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