In 2004, Steve Jobs he found out that he is sick with cancer, more precisely cancer of the pancreas, and then he was told that an operation could offer him a very high chance of recovery. Then Steve Jobs refused the operation and for 9 months he ignored the pleas of those around him until he gave in and agreed to perform the said operation. Isaacson claims that Steve Jobs was the type of person who believed that if I ignored something long enough it would magically disappear. Unfortunately, by the time he decided to operate, the cancer had spread beyond the pancreas to the tissues around it and into authorized biography written by Walter Isaacson Steve Jobs declares that he regrets very much the refusal to do an operation that would have given him much more chances to survive.
I've asked [Jobs why he didn't get an operation then] and he said, 'I didn't want my body to be opened...I didn't want to be violated in that way,'” Isaacson recalls. So he waited nine months, while his wife and others urged him to do it, before getting the operation, reveals Isaacson. Asked by [60 Minutes correspondent Steve] Kroft how such an intelligent man could make such a seemingly stupid decision, Isaacson replies, "I think that he kind of felt that if you ignore something, if you don't want something to exist, you can have magical thinking...we talked about this a lot," he tells Kroft. "He wanted to talk about it, how he regretted it....I think he felt he should have been operated on sooner.
Steve Jobs lied to those around him by telling them that he was cured of the cruel disease when in reality his situation was more than serious. Even with a delay of 9 months and with an aggravation of the disease, Steve Jobs lived another 6 years, much longer than any other suffering from pancreatic cancer and Walter Isaacson declared the other day that the passion for Apple kept Jobs alive as long as. The information provided today by Isaacson is part of an interview that will be broadcast on CBS and for which we have a short preview in the video above.
The authorized biography of Steve Jobs will be officially launched next week in the iBookStore.
