His lyrical language offers clarity around living a meaningful life in the time that we have as we never know when our time will be up. It is a very well written story and an impactful read that makes you feel as though you are there in the room with him. Kalanithi was an exceptional neurosurgeon and writer who profoundly articulates his journey. It is an incredibly profound read and I would recommend it to all. 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. ![]() ![]() Description: New York : Random House, 2016. His eye picking up that the tumour had dispersed across the lungs and spread to the spine and the liver. Title: When breath becomes air / Paul Kalanithi foreword by Abraham Verghese. 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. He was the one who initially had the strong instinct to have a child despite his illness.Paul Kalanithi was a neurosurgeon and writer. He was just thrilled to be a dad, and just the fact of having this infant just breathed this unbelievable life into our house. ![]() On their daughter, Elizabeth Acadia Kalanithi So, it was so intense to get this diagnosis on top of everything else that meant that his ability to participate in all of the things that were bringing him meaning - particularly writing this book and being together with our daughter and our family - was really devastating. And then when he was diagnosed with a form of metastatic brain cancer called leptomeningeal disease - it's essentially like tumors are coating your brain and your spinal cord, and it also holds the prospect of seizures or trouble speaking, trouble thinking. This whole second half of the book is Paul thinking about how to grapple, in a very real way, with his own mortality.
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