There
are books that break your heart. And then there are books that create a hole in
your chest so deep that it may take a long time to get repaired. These are the
books that touch the nerves inside you that hurt the most, strip you of all the
faux coping mechanisms under which you have covered yourself and then leave you
out in the cold letting those nerves hurt, and hurt hard.
Paul Kalanithi's 'When
Breath Becomes Air' is one such book for me. The book though started on a bleak
note with a long foreword and a lot of details about Paul's education, his
words started touching those raw nerves when he talks about his journey, first
as a medical student, then as a doctor and later as a patient.
'When Breath Becomes Air'
talks about mortality and life in the rawest words possible. Paul's confessions
as a doctor, sympathy towards his patients, the urge to understand the
patient-doctor relationship that is laced with limitations and exhilaration
both, his responsibility as a neurosurgeon and his quest to understand life and
death make you adore him for the person and the doctor that he was. The only
thought crosses your mind at this point is 'If only. If only all the doctors in
today's times were like him.
And then starts the
narrative of his own journey as a cancer patient at the age of thirty six when
life was looking more promising than ever. But as they say, life is what
happens to you when you are busy making other plans. During his suffering as a
patient, he keeps going back to thinking about the times when the roles were
reverse.
All through the book, you
can feel the urgency. The urgency to tell so many things, the urgency to pour
everything out, the urgency of time - the most limited resource he had. The
book tears you up with a epilogue written by his wife. The details she captured
about his death, about her climbing into the bed with him one last time when he
was about to let go is heart wrenching.
I don't know if this book
tore me apart because I have a history of losing someone too close to this
disease seventeen years ago. And it still hurts the same. But then it is said
that when something comes straight from the heart, it hits hard. And a dying
man's words couldn't have come from anywhere else.
This book goes
undoubtedly to my list of most loved books. Go read. And get your heart broken
a little bit.
Quoting a few lines that
I loved from the book.
“All of medicine, not
just cadaver dissection, trespasses into sacred spheres. Doctors invade the
body in every way imaginable. They see people at their most vulnerable, their
most scared, their most private. They escort them into the worlds and then back
out. Seeing the body as a matter and mechanism is the flip side to easing the
most profound human suffering”.
“Learning to judge whose lives could be
saved, whose couldn’t be, and whose shouldn’t be requires an
unattainable prognostic ability.”
“When
there’s no space for the scalpel, words are the surgeon’s only tool.”
"If the weight of
mortality doesn't grow lighter, does it at least grow familiar?”
“Part of the cruelty of
cancer, though, is not only that it limits your time; it also limits your
energy, vastly reducing the amount you can squeeze into a day”
“Death may be a onetime
event, but living with terminal illness is a process”
