When Breath Becomes Air
Author: Paul Kalanithi
I read a book two days ago that affected me in ways that very few books have. Franz Kafka once said that a book should be like an axe for the frozen sea within us. Well, this book was like Zeus' thunderbolt. I'm talking about When Breath Becomes Air, a memoir written by 36-year-old Paul Kalanithi, a brilliant neurosurgeon who died of stage 4 metastatic lung cancer.
Acquired in: August 2020
This pandemic has forced all of us to at least acknowledge our mortality, but how would it be like to anticipate a bright future and then face a crisis that blows everything out of proportion? Life would never be the same again. Kalanithi was a prime example of an educated individual- BA and MA in English Literature and BA in Human Biology from Stanford University, MPhil in history and philosophy of science and medicine from Cambridge and graduated with honours from Yale School of Medicine. Besides that, he was aiming to be a neurosurgeon cum neuroscientist at Stanford. He was just about to finish a decade's neurosurgical training when he sought medical attention for the pain wracking his body and received his fatal diagnosis. Suddenly, everything changed. He had planned his life to the nth degree, but now he could not say for sure what turn his health would take after midday.
Throughout his life, he searched to find the meaning of death. He writes about what he does as a surgeon, the exhilaration he feels during complex surgeries as well as the despair brought on by the never-ending and sometimes, unforeseen deaths. Reading this book made me realise how hard it is to tell someone that the person they loved is no more; to silently bear the angry outbursts of the bereaved and to console the dying. Being a doctor or a surgeon is a calling, he says, for if you regard it as a job, it's one of the worst jobs there is. Yes, there are patients sent away happy and whole, yet we need to know both sides of this intense profession.
Paul Kalanithi was a doctor seeking the meaning behind existence before his diagnosis. After the diagnosis, he became a patient, lying in the same hospital room where he treated his patients and trying to fit in a lifetime's plans into two years. Besides helping me realise that we cannot be oracles, I am grateful to him for showing me the intricate beauty as well as the crushing pressure of his profession. If there is any book I would highly recommend, it is this. A quote of his would be a precise summary of the book- You can't ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.
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