When Breath Becomes Air

by Paul Kalanithi

He said during medical school he’d assumed that he would become a psychiatrist, only to fall in love with neurosurgery.

“If I were a neurosurgeon and I announced that I had to leave my guests to go in for an emergency craniotomy, no one would say a word. But if I said I needed to leave the guests in the living room to go upstairs to write…”

MRIs for back pain are expensive, and unnecessary imaging had lately become a major national point of cost-saving emphasis.

My mother, afraid the impoverished school system would hobble her children, acquired, from somewhere, a “college prep reading list.”

Excellence in parenthood.

If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?

A word meant something only between people, and life’s meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form.

Where did biology, morality, literature, and philosophy intersect?

Cadaver dissection is a medical rite of passage

formaldehyde is a powerful appetite stimulant, so you also crave a burrito.

Prosopagnosia is a neurological disorder wherein one loses the ability to see faces.

We were instructed to no longer call them “cadavers”; “donors” was the preferred term.

“Neurosurgery residents aren’t just the best surgeons—we’re the best doctors in the hospital.

From that point on, I resolved to treat all my paperwork as patients, and not vice versa.

He’d assess the abdomen, then ask for my prognosis on a patient’s cognitive function. “Well, he could still be a senator,” I once replied, “but only from a small state.”

Humor in the ER!

glioblastoma—an aggressive brain cancer, the worst kind.

How little do doctors understand the hells through which we put patients.

had sent nearly every one of my patients to physical therapy. And now I found myself shocked at how difficult it was. As a doctor, you have a sense of what it’s like to be sick, but until you’ve gone through

Months of physical therapy for two total knee replacements. Yes, it is exceedingly difficult. But yet, has to be done.

Death may be a one-time event, but living with terminal illness is a process.

There is a tension in the Bible between justice and mercy, between the Old Testament and the New Testament.

All lay still, silent, with IV tubing dripping poison into outstretched arms.

I am going to avoid this as much as I can.

when a patient had told me that she always wore her most expensive socks to the doctor’s office, so that when she was in a patient’s gown and shoeless, the doctor would see the socks and know she was a person of substance, to be treated with respect.

I’m going to try this!

“I will share your joy and sorrow / Till we’ve seen this journey through.”