When breath becomes air
(Book)

"A memoir by a young neurosurgeon faced with a terminal cancer diagnosis who attempts to answer the question What makes a life worth living? In May of 2013, when he was on the verge of completing a decade's worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. This memoir chronicles Kalanithi's transformation from a naive medical student into a neurosurgeon at Stanford studying the brain, and then suddenly into a patient confronting his own mortality. What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with. Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015 while working on this book. He was 37 years old. His words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. "I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything," he wrote. "Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: 'I can't go on. I'll go on.'" A, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a man who became both. Paul Kalanithi, M.D. grew up in Kingman, Arizona. His essays and interviews can be viewed on his website, paulkalanithi.com