![]() ![]() When Breath Becomes Air is an insightful read and asks us to question what makes life worth living in the face of death. The real question is not, how long, but rather, how we live. When Breath Becomes Air is an eloquent articulation of the fact that we all face our mortality each and every day, whether we are conscious of it or not. He ended up deciding neurosurgery, as he was interested in the “unforgiving call to perfection.”Īs cancer weakened his body, he continued to write. He then enrolled in medicine as he wanted action and “answers that are not in books.” It was never just a job, it was an approach to metaphysical questions that he had during his English degree. He was a doctor’s son in the desert, offered a place at Stanford University and completed a postgraduate degree in English literature. The book was written in the year before his death.īefore he was diagnosed, Paul’s life was exceptional. Instead he was confronting a terminal illness and an identity crisis as he switched from doctor to patient. He was on the verge of becoming a fully qualified neurosurgeon and starting a family with his wife, Lucy. The surgeon that the book follows is Paul Kalanithi who was found to have cancer that had metastasized at age 36. The thing that changed the perspective of the interpretation was that these were scans from his own body. The simple diagnosis was: cancer that had metastasised. His eye picking up that the tumour had dispersed across the lungs and spread to the spine and the liver. The book begins with a trainee surgeon interpreting a set of CT scans. It was just a matter of time before he was told it was lung cancer and he faced his own mortality. He could see himself as finally becoming the husband he had promised to be, but then the night sweats, weight loss, cough and back pain started. The very pinnacle of the plot is described by Kalanithi as being at the neurosurgical training mountaintop and seeing the Promised Land, from Gilead to Jericho, to the Mediterranean Sea. When Breath Becomes Air follows Kalanithi’s journey from medical student, deciding what would provide a meaningful life, to neurosurgeon, who operates in the very centre of the human identity: the brain, before finally a patient with terminal cancer, as a new father. He gives a unique perspective as a neurosurgeon who was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. He had degrees in English literature, biology and history and philosophy of science and medicine from Stanford and Cambridge university before completing medicine at Yale School of Medicine. ![]() It is our fate as living, breathing, metabolizing organisms.Paul Kalanithi was a neurosurgeon and writer. as he faces death with such integrity.ĭeath comes for all of us. You really get the sense of him racing against time to get the book finished. ![]() Throughout the book Kalanithi is constantly searching for meaning, which he finds ultimately in his work. The discussions between him and his doctor are informative and revealing - it's hard for him to just be the patient. What I found incredibly brave was how he returns to neurosrugery for a period - because he could. Just as he is about to start the next stage of his 20 year plan, he is perparing for his death. It's devastating to see the diagnosis after a decade of gruelling training. He tells his story without self pity and with great integrity, and of the journey from doctor to patient. He writes so clearly, and you can tell that his first love is literature. It's easy to see why ‘When breath becomes air’ has become a bestseller. After receiving this devastating news, he decides he’s going to do something that he always wanted to do: write a book. Paul Kalanithi is approaching the end of a decade of training as a neurosurgeon when he receives the news that he has lung cancer, just before he gets the chance to practice as a fully qualified surgeon. With what strife and pains we come into the world we know not, but ’tis commonly no easy matter to get out of it.” -Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici ![]()
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