when breath becomes air

I think this might be one of the reviews I will look back at years later and find cringeworthy.

When Breath Becomes Air has been on my to-read list since forever, but I never really got around to it. I was on the plane and feeling the altitude, so I was craving a memoir or something with an emotional punch, and this book came up in my ebook library.

Out of all of the careers I have entertained, medicine was never one of them. I am not sure why. Maybe it was the thought of blood that scared me. Kalanithi became a doctor to find the tangible in what makes life meaningful. “I studied literature and philosophy to understand what makes life meaningful, studied neuroscience and worked in an fMRI lab to understand how the brain could give rise to an organism capable of finding meaning in the world,” he writes, and that “Moral speculation was puny compared to moral action.”

I really liked this book because it made me realize that prognoses are human; statistics, like the Kaplan-Meier, are human (especially once you become a point on the curve); medicine is human. The word patient comes from the Latin verb patior, pati, passus sum, which means to suffer. While doctors see patients at their most vulnerable, and do so with compassion and care, it was interesting to read about Kalanithi’s transition from doctor to patient - the willing relinquishing of power he had to undergo. 

I want to write about how smart his prose is: pithy one-liners like “I resolved to treat all my paperwork as patients, and not vice versa.” “With one of the ER residents covering for me, I slipped back in, ghostlike, to save the ice cream sandwich in front of the corpse of the son I could not.” Or, “The question is not simply whether to live or die but what kind of life is worth living.” But given the gravity of his book, I don’t think it’s appropriate. Kalanithi left his mark in reaching what he himself describes as a “pluperfect state.” And he did so with such grace and humility.