![]() ![]() Yes, all cancer patients are unlucky, but there’s cancer, and then there’s CANCER, and you have to be really unlucky to have the latter. Severe illness wasn’t life-altering, it was life-shattering. I found myself the sheep, lost and confused. You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving. The secret is to know that the deck is stacked, that you will lose, that your hands or judgment will slip, and yet still struggle to win for your patients. Even if you are perfect, the world isn’t. Our patients’ lives and identities may be in our hands, yet death always wins. Onerous yoke, that of mortal responsibility. If boredom is, as Heidegger argued, the awareness of time passing, then surgery felt like the opposite: the intense focus made the arms of the clock seem arbitrarily placed. I mean, obviously, I would’ve gone through anything for my kids, but today is the first day that all the suffering seems worth it.” How little do doctors understand the hells through which we put patients. During our final weekly chat, he turned to me and said, You know, today is the first day it all seems worth it. His hair had thinned and whitened, and the spark in his eyes had dulled. I’d never met someone so successful who was also so committed to goodness. V maintained that our only obligation was to be authentic to the scientific story and to tell it uncompromisingly. Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job-not a calling.īecause the brain mediates our experience of the world, any neurosurgical problem forces a patient and family, ideally with a doctor as a guide, to answer this question: What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?Īny major illness transforms a patient’s-really, an entire family’s-life. Indeed, this is how 99 percent of people select their jobs: pay, work environment, hours. ![]() I finished my degree and headed back to the States. Moral speculation was puny compared to moral action. It was only in practicing medicine that I could pursue a serious biological philosophy. Stepping back, I realized that I was merely confirming what I already knew: I wanted that direct experience. Words began to feel as weightless as the breath that carried them. It didn’t quite fit in an English department. My thesis-“Whitman and the Medicalization of Personality”-was well-received, but it was unorthodox, including as much history of psychiatry and neuroscience as literary criticism. My brief forays into the formal ethics of analytic philosophy felt dry as a bone, missing the messiness and weight of real human life. ![]() Literature not only illuminated another’s experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection. “The doctor will be in soon.” And with that, the future I had imagined, the one just about to be realized, the culmination of decades of striving, evaporated.Ĭonrad, for his hypertuned sense of how miscommunication between people can so profoundly impact their lives. A young nurse, one I hadn’t met, poked her head in. I knew a lot about back pain-its anatomy, its physiology, the different words patients used to describe different kinds of pain-but I didn’t know what it felt like. Most Important Keywords, Sentences, Quotes: The second part details the years of fighting the sickness and the aftermath of his early death (written by his wife). In the first part, Kalanithi describes how his life looked like before finding out that he had stage four lung career. When Breath Becomes Air has a two-part structure. It’s stunning by all means - the descriptions are vivid, the style makes it a page-turner, and the emotions… they hit hard as a truck. Paul Kalanithi wanted to study English language and literature and you can see that translating into the book. Damn, this book hit me so hard when I read it. ![]()
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