Just Finished Reading: When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi (FP: 2016)

At 36 Dr Kalanithi was on his way to becoming a top-flight neurosurgeon, a man at the top of a difficult field with his whole future ahead of him. He had a new wife, a bright future and a life-long dream of making a difference helping people. Then one morning he woke to crippling back pain. Not overly surprised or worried – he was after all standing up in an operating theatre and bending over patients for hours at a time – he took some painkillers and got on with his day. The pain subsided and he thought nothing more of it. Then weeks later it happened again only worse this time. Still thinking it was nothing he went to his own hospital and booked himself in for an MRI scan. Not expecting to find anything worse that a compressed vertebrae or other spinal related problems he was incredulous at the probable cause – cancer. After the initial shock wore off it was time for him and his wife – both experienced medical practitioners – to make decisions: chemo or radiation therapy, work or no work, what was important to keep and worth any risks they needed to take. Immediately he asked the question no doubt on everyone’s lips – how long? Not willing to put a date on it his doctor (an expert in the field) told him that the most important thing he could focus on was fighting the disease. Everything else would arrive in its own time. So fight they would. But they would also do one other thing – they would have a child now rather than leaving it to later in their careers. All of a sudden there was no ‘later’ without the risk of it being simply too late. Paul’s career could have gone one of two ways. Passionate about the written word from his earliest days he often imagined himself as an author. Equally passionate about medicine and about the brain in particular he wanted to use his skill to save people’s lives. With that option potentially closed to him Paul decided to spend whatever time he had left – 8 months it turned out – to write this book about his battle with cancer and his thoughts about what makes life worth living in the face of death.

After reading ‘Being Mortal – Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End’ by Atul Gawande I couldn’t help but compare these two similar works, similar as topic goes anyway. Paul’s book was, as you might expect, a far more personal narrative than ‘Being Mortal’. Oddly because of this I actually found this book surprisingly less satisfying than the previous foray into death and the meaning of life. Possibly because of the much narrower focus on Paul and his immediate family, possibly because ‘Being Mortal’ looked not only at death itself and how individuals coped (or didn’t) with its approach but how western society at large shied away from the reality of death and practically ignored it when it couldn’t hide from it. ‘Being Mortal’ was, I found, a much more cultural book than Paul’s well written emotional memoir and I liked it (although ‘like’ is probably not exactly the appropriate word her) more because of that. This is not to say that Paul’s book was poor because it certainly was not. It’s thoughtful, emotionally rich and deeply personal. It puts you right inside someone’s head when they are presented with a fact beyond argument that will change their life far from what they imagined it would be. Recommended.