“You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”
When Breath Becomes Air
My rating
5 / 5
Self-Purchased copy
Author
Paul Kalanithi
Publisher
Penguin Random House
Genre
Nonfiction / Memoir
Number of Pages
225
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Summary
Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer and his book details his journey from being a successful doctor to a hopeless patient. He was only thirty-six and was about to complete ten years of training as a neurosurgeon when tragedy hit him.
My Review
The journey begins when Paul chose literature first as his preferred stream for a profession. Profound thinking like "by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life", veered him into medical science. Another realization then dawned on him that studying medical science and practicing it are two very different things. He explains this using the example of delivering a baby. “Pull the head to facilitate delivery of the shoulder the books said. But do it judiciously or you might risk permanent nerve injury” is something you’re not taught.
Paul’s journey towards death is arduous, painful yet he never faltered and faced it with integrity is evident from the book. His experiences helped him find meaning.
This book made me realize that hidden behind those indifferent, arrogant and at times cruel exteriors, doctors are human beings as vulnerable as you and me. The book details a lot of medical procedures and terminology but you’ll never feel lost.
The book’s narrative was cut short due to the author’s progressing disease and worsening condition. The last chapter is an epilogue by his wife Lucy, who eight months earlier had given birth to their dear daughter, Cady. Although the book is astonishing, heartbreaking, and absolutely emotional, it was while reading this epilogue that I just couldn’t control my tears anymore.
Final verdict
After reading this book I am deeply saddened by the fact that the world not only lost a great neurosurgeon, but also a profound writer and a beautiful human being.
To end my views I’ll just quote Lucy, Paul’s wife – What happened to Paul was tragic, but he was not a tragedy.
Paul Kalanithi
Paul Kalanithi, M.D., was a neurosurgeon and writer. Paul grew up in Kingman, Arizona, before attending Stanford University, from which he graduated in 2000 with a B.A. and M.A. in English Literature and a B.A. in Human Biology. He earned an M.Phil in History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine from the University of Cambridge before attending medical school. In 2007, Paul graduated cum-laude from the Yale School of Medicine, winning the Lewis H. Nahum Prize for outstanding research and membership in the Alpha Omega Alpha medical honor society. He returned to Stanford for residency training in Neurological Surgery and a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience, during which he authored over twenty scientific publications and received the American Academy of Neurological Surgery’s highest award for research.
Paul’s reflections on doctoring and have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Paris Review Daily, in addition to interviews in academic settings and media outlets such as MSNBC. Paul completed neurosurgery residency in 2014. Paul died in March, 2015, while working on When Breath Becomes Air, an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing mortality and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a gifted writer who became both.. He is survived by his wife Lucy and their daughter Cady.
- Top Quotes from When Breath Becomes Air -
“You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”
“Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.”
“That message is simple: When you come to one of the many moments in life when 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.”
“There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.”
“even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.”
“Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.”
“The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.”
“I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely. The problem wasn’t really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.”
“Those burdens are what make medicine holy and wholly impossible: in taking up another’s cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight.”
“I expected to feel only empty and heartbroken after Paul died. It never occurred to me that you could love someone the same way after he was gone, that I would continue to feel such love and gratitude alongside the terrible sorrow, the grief so heavy that at times I shiver and moan under the weight of it.”
“If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?”
“The 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.”
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