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 doctor-friends we were trying to rule out more sinister causes.

   Paul paints a pretty good picture about what it means to be a patient who’s also a doctor. You already know most of the facts and the legitimate websites to get some more so you can fill-in the blanks. You’re already thinking worst-case scenario as you consider treatment options. You self-medicate, panic and sometimes underestimate. You try to drive and be the passenger all at the same time. And after internship I can now attest to the fact that medics suck at being patients!

   The flipside is being a doctor with a loved-one who’s the patient. Everyone handles it differently. You’re advised against treating them yourself because objectivity might be an issue. You have deeper and bigger questions about your patient’s progress. At some point while interacting with said loved-one’s primary doctor you toe the line between colleague and concerned loved-one and that means that you might end-up stepping on some toes.

   I felt challenged by his story. The man studied philosophy and literature for years in a bid to understand life and death and finally settled on medicine as the way to find an answer. And not just any field of medicine: Neurosurgery. Well, that’s one way to find a calling! He talks about being in med-school and going through internship and residency and being a doctor and I relate to that so much because I’ve lived 75% of that! (Is this how lawyers feel when they read John Grisham?)
And then he talks about receiving a damning diagnosis at the cusp of greatness and the peak of his youth and how he dealt with that; and that’s incredibly powerful.

   So here I am, rating this 10/10. Read this book and then share it with a friend.
Ciao…