When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

He writes that “we were all silently apologizing to our cadavers, not because we sensed the transgression but because we did not.” Among those classmates, Kalanithi meets his wife-to-be, Lucy Goddard, M.D. Caring for patients, he decides, offers the best way of exploring “what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” In gross anatomy class at medical school, he and his fellow students learn to repress the thought that they are slicing open real people. His search leads him to medicine after all. He studies all three, first at Stanford, then at Cambridge. What interests Kalanithi is how to formulate a philosophy of life at the intersection of biology, philosophy, and literature. Growing up in Kingman, Ariz., he feels no inclination to emulate his cardiologist father, who leaves home at dawn and returns in the dark.

“And with that,” he writes, “the future I had imagined, the one just about to be realized, the culmination of decades of striving, evaporated.” It is spring 2013, he is 36, and Stanford has been courting him for a faculty job.Īfter describing that terrible day, Kalanithi explains how he has reached that moment. He sees lungs “matted with innumerable tumors, the spine deformed, a full lobe of the liver obliterated. ’07, in his sixth year of a neurosurgery residency at Stanford, sits before a hospital computer looking at CT scans. In the opening paragraph, Paul Kalanithi, M.A., M.Phil., M.D. The catastrophe in When Breath Becomes Air reveals itself immediately.

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi