Book Review: When breath becomes air by Paul Kalanithi
I heard about this book about two years back and promised myself I wouldn’t read it. It felt a bit morbid for me to be reading about a 36-year old doctor who had just been diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. I'd seen more than enough young cancer patients as a me med-student and I felt that it was just too close to home considering my chosen career path. Even my mom did a double-take when she saw that I was reading a book about death and dying. But apparently something changed in my perspective over the past two years and now I’m here on the other side of the epilogue. Let’s just call it life. I’ve written about med-student syndrome in posts before and the bad news is that it doesn’t get any better once you’re a real doctor. If anything, the experience you garner makes it worse. A friend of mine had a persistent headache for two days last week with no other symptoms. It was probably stress-induced or something but in the back of our minds as docto...