Rating: 5/5
Favorite Quote:
"You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving"
Lyrical, lovely, and utterly heartbreaking!!!
Doctor as Patient Comes Full Circle.
I would give this book a whole lot more stars. This is a book of hope and endings.
I read this beautifully written by memoir by Dr. Paul Kalanithi. And when I did finish it, I reexplored the pages, the underlined passages and knew it would be for the last time, it brought me to tears many times.
When Abraham Verghese writes the forward and Atul Gawande calls a book "breathtaking", it’s got a lot to live up to for me. When Breath Become Air by Paul Kalanithi lives up to the hype.
A stunning, powerful read by a neurosurgeon diagnosed with terminal cancer when he was 36 years old. This book is written in 2 parts about his life before and after his diagnosis, his transformation from doctor-to-patient-to-doctor-to-patient and coming to grips with death and mortality in an entirely different way.
Kalanithi vacillated between a career in lit or medicine and his love of language is apparent in every sentence. This book is one of those rare treasures that grab you right from the start and leave you breathless.
The book is worth every single page. Every single sentence. Every single word. His way with language makes me sad for what the world lost as a writer. Like the Last Lecture, this book was searing and sad and heartbreaking. A promising career and life with his young wife, Paul's memoir leaves valuable to the healthy, the sick and the dying about life's meaning.
This is an excellent meditation on life - it's meaning and a human being's struggle to leave a legacy. This will inspire you to ask the right questions and the possibility of living a better version of yourself - made me think about my life and take stock of what I have accomplished and the things that I still want to accomplish. Not in a morose way, but in an introspective way.
Some favorite quotes:
"I had come to see language as an almost supernatural force, existing between people, bringing our brains, shielded in centimeter-thick walls, into communion. A word meant something only between people, and life's meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form. It was the relational aspect of humans - i.e., "human relationality" - that undergirded meaning. Yet somehow, this process existed in brains and bodies, subject to their own physiologic imperative, prone to breaking and failing. There must be a way, I thought, that the language of life as experienced - of passion, of hunger, of love - bore some relationship, however convoluted, to the language of neurons, digestive tracts, and heartbeats." (p. 33)
"As a resident, my highest ideal was not saving lives - everyone dies eventually - but guiding a patient or family to an understanding of death or illness. When a patient comes in with a fatal head bleed, that first conversation with a neurosurgeon may forever color how the family remembers the death, from a peaceful letting go ("Maybe it was his time") to an open sore of regret ("Those doctors didn't listen! They didn't even try to save him!"). When there's no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon's only tool." (p. 56)
"Being with patients in these moments certainly had its emotional cost, but it also had its rewards. I don't think I ever spent a minute of any day wondering why I did this work, or whether it was worth it. The call to protect life - and not merely life but another's identity; it is perhaps not too much to say another's soul - was obvious in its sacredness." (p. 61)
"[T]he physician's duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face, and make sense of, their own existence." (p. 94)
"There is perhaps only one thing to say to this infant, who is all future, overlapping briefly with me, whose life, barring the improbable, is all but past.
That message is simple:
When you come to one of the many moments in your life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man's days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing." (p. 109).
“The enormity of the moral mission of medicine lent my early days of med school a severe gravity.” Kalanithi expresses early in in his career the weight of what he was about to undertake and how even then, it affected him. Throughout the book, Kalanithi continues to describe with surgical precision many of the procedures he completes while ongoingly confronting who he is in those moments and what his contribution to the overall effect is, including the counseling of patient and family.
I value this book for many reasons but also because I felt personally touched by Paul's words and he helped with the grief I feel for my grandfather, who also suffered from lung cancer and died (older than Paul’s age though).
Paul's writing never dwells on the sadness of his short life but faces his chances head on. We lost a promising doctor in neurology, but gained life's valuable lessons of how to be brave in the end.
Bravo to his wife, Lucy, who writes a beautiful Epilogue and gave the book a promised end.
"Knowing that even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living"
Shi'tare
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