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Salman Rushdie has opened up concerning the devastating second he was advised he “likely” had cancer not lengthy after he was virtually stabbed to loss of life.
The author, 76, made the revelation in his new memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, which recounts the savage 2022 assault.
Rushdie, who famously had a fatwa – assassination order – issued in opposition to him, was making ready to do a chat on free speech on the Chautauqua Institution in New York when the tried homicide passed off.
He was stabbed round a dozen instances in an assault that lasted simply 27 seconds – leaving him blind in a single eye and with everlasting injury to his hand.
The fatwa was issued – and later eliminated – due to allegedly blasphemous content material in his 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, which offended some Muslims.
But as he got here to phrases along with his accidents, he needed to face a brand new, sudden menace to his life – cancer.
“After I narrowly escaped a murder attempt, I had to face the prospect of cancer,” he wrote. “This was unacceptable,” he recalled pondering. “It was unfair.”
The author defined {that a} “bump” was recognized when he had his prostate examined as a part of an total well being check-up.
“On the 1-to-5 scale of probability they used, I had scored a wretched 4. Cancer likely,” the author recalled.
What adopted was an agonising two-month wait earlier than he bought the all-clear.
Rushdie defined that shortly after the abnormality was found, a physician was left “puzzled” by his take a look at outcomes, which had been finally “contradictory”.
He wrote: “The normal test for prostate cancer is a PSA, a blood test that measures the amount of prostate-specific antigen in your blood. A high PSA number is considered dangerous, a low number is reassuring.
“But the MRI result said cancer likely.
“[The doctor] said [a recent] UTI might be responsible for the bump on my prostate,” the author recalled, however he must “wait some weeks” earlier than testing once more.
The physician tried to reassure him, telling the author that if it was prostate cancer, it spreads “slowly”.
Thankfully for Rushdie, two months after being advised that he “likely” had cancer, he bought the all-clear.
“The second MRI took place in December, two months after reading cancer likely. This time the scan was clear. On the scale of 1 to 5, I was now a proud 1,” he wrote.
“There was no lump. I didn’t have prostate cancer. The universe wasn’t quite as cruel as that, even though it had waited two long months to tell me so.”
In his new e book, which Rushdie admits writing to assist him course of the assault, he recollects the second he noticed his would-be murderer for the primary time.
“So it’s you. Here you are,” the author recalled. “It felt like something coming out of the distant past and trying to drag me back in time, if you like, back into that distant past, in order to kill me.”
Hadi Matar, then 24, is assuced of attacking the author and is at present ready trial – having been held with out bail because the August 2022 assault.
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder is launched on 16 April.
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