'When Breath Becomes Air' by Paul Kalanithi - Book review

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”

Just a silly Housewife !!

At your service all day

Your conveniences, your comforts

Right from day’s first ray

But wait, she doesn’t manage office life

After all, she is just a silly housewife

Running the entire household

Things ready at their place

Just the way you’ve told

But she doesn’t face the clients

After all, she is just a silly housewife

Knowing your taste

Aware of what you hate

Food, clothes and your toothpaste

But she needn’t fulfill the March deadlines

After all, she is just a silly housewife

Caring when you are down with flu

Enwrapping you with her warmth

Pumping when you’re lost without clue

But she doesn’t hear boss’s musical voice

After all, she is just a silly housewife

Smiles when you return

Stories of your day patiently she listens

Dishes of your choice she will arduously churn

But she doesn’t know what is travelling crowded like

After all, she is just a silly housewife

Your happiness is her priority

Compensation is your smile

Does everything to the best of her ability

But she doesn’t know the work life strife

After all, she is just a silly housewife

Treat her, mistreat her

Just the way you like

After all

She is just a silly housewife !!

This post is written as a part of April A to Z Challenge 2014 under Non-Themed category. I am doing two posts for this Challenge and Themed posts can be found here.

Incident every working mother should read !!

By the end of this post, you would agree that the post justifies the title I have given. I got to know about this shocking incident a few days back from a friend and I have been telling this incident to a lot of people and have wanted to write about this since long.

This is a true incident. Both husband and wife were working and had a two year old baby. Husband’s and wife’s family stayed in some other state. Since none of the families could come and take care of the baby, they appointed a caretaker woman which is a pretty normal practice in a lot of households where no family members are available to look after the children of working parents. The woman came everyday in morning before the parents left and stayed with the baby till they returned. This continued for a few months. The baby seemed to have adjusted with the caretaker and things were running absolutely smooth.

One day, the mother came back from office unannounced by lunch time. She saw that her baby was fast asleep and asked the caretaker when had she slept to which she replied that the baby had gone to sleep after her breakfast. The mother asked the caretaker to take a leave since she was now available at home.

When the baby did not wake up even after five-six hours, she panicked and called her husband. They took the baby to the hospital where his blood samples were taken. And when the reports arrived, its revelations shocked everybody. The doctor told them that the baby’s blood had traces of sedatives/ sleeping pills.

The caretaker mixed sedatives in baby’s food so that the baby would fall asleep all during her stay not causing her any trouble and she could while away her time without any efforts to actually look after the baby.

I am not much aware if the parents registered a police complaint and whether the caretaker woman was caught or not. But I just hope they did and the woman was caught.

I am not a mother, but just listening about a child being drugged to sleep sent chills down my spine. I can just imagine how the mother would have coped with this. Had it not been for the coincidence of her returning early, she would have never known about this cruel act and it would have continued damaging the child’s body to God knows what extent. I am not sure about the medical effects the sleeping pills could have on a child, but the very fact that they were being used on a child was a shocker to me.  

Just thought of sharing this incident. It might just help someone.

This post is written as a part of April A to Z Challenge 2014 under Non-Themed category. I am doing two posts for this Challenge and Themed posts can be found here.

Fiction, Really ??

When I wrote this post, a lot of people I knew asked me whether this was a real incident or a fictional one. All I replied was, ‘Sssh.. it’s a secret’. And I don’t know what people construed out of it. This hasn’t been the sole case. A lot of friends who read me have asked me similar questions when they have read some or the other post.

Haven’t you heard that real life inspires our films? And isn’t it vice versa too? Don’t films have an impact on real life too, good as well as bad? Can something similar be said for our literary world too? We know that reading inspires people in real life. But is it also the other way round? Does fiction get inspired from real life too?

Isn’t it possible that fiction writers create characters, situations and stories that they have seen or even been a part of? The situations we read about in books, the short crisp stories we read on blogs could actually have been enacted in real life.

Those thousands of characters we come across the pages of hardcovers and paperbacks, the ones we glance through the silvery screens of our ebook readers may have lives of their own, may be they are real people just dipped in the colours of fiction by the writers by giving them fancy names, adding the right amount of texture, may be mixing more than one real life character to create a completely new persona that gets the author appreciated for a well sketched character. May be even the dialogues have actually been said in real life between people, only to be added by the observant author just at the correct time in the story.   

While breaking up, one of my friend’s ex-boyfriend on being asked what about the promises that he had made, had said that she could kill him for not fulfilling those promises but he would never spend his life with her. Doesn’t this line resonate to this - “I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you.” (Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead) And I am pretty much sure that that guy has never ever heard about The Fountainhead, forget about reading it. Of course, Ayn Rand wrote it much before. But when she told me about that line, I remembered the book.

Haven’t we all used ‘come on, you don’t have to be sorry’ to our loved ones sometime or the other. Just that Eric Segal put it in Love Story as “Love means never having to say you're sorry.”

Whosoever thought about creating the characters of nosy neighbours and aunties, about the ever confused young generation, about those over-the-top loud Punjabi characters; I am sure must have met a few around.  

And what about coincidentally meeting the girl you had a crush in your school after several years, the hero falling in love with a nerd girl or vice versa, tit-for-tat for your mother-in-law, steamy romantic scenes, hard break-up stories, tales about wrong decisions of life; may be all of such situations have actually happened, may be they are happening even right now. God knows which pair of writer eyes is witnessing them and creating new masterpieces about them in their head.

Have you done it? Like, have you created stories out of real life characters and situations?

This post is written as a part of April A to Z Challenge 2014 under Non-Themed category. I am doing two posts for this Challenge and Themed posts can be found here.

Available in herds ??

Yes, I asked the question of the tittle to myself when I heard views of somebody on women. Somebody, who is educated and works at a good position in an organization. We were having a general conversation about this one girl we knew who was leaving her job since she was getting married someplace else.

And this is what he said. ‘You know that’s why I don’t think women should be educated. The women these days take half of the seats in schools, high end colleges and jobs. And at the end what do they do? They leave their high paying jobs. Isn’t that the sheer waste of seats? First, in schools and colleges and then in jobs as well? I mean, had there been a guy in her place, who would have studied in that good college and gotten himself a job that she landed on, he would have continued the job. He would be taking care of an entire family.’

Logic told me to argue and say that if that girl was leaving a job here, she would take up the job somewhere else too. It’s not that she has wasted entire education of hers. And even if she decides to quit, that cannot be a reason of depriving her of the education. I thought I should tell him about what difference a woman can make in the family if she is educated even though she would not go out and work.

But then sanity took over me and I kept mum. I switched on my plastic smile mode. (the one where I am uttering expletives under my breath and my face has the most angelic smile ever. It comes with practice. Try it sometime.)

Why should I be arguing with a person who doesn’t even has his basics correct? How much difference would I make in his thinking by adding a few arguments? If he had slightest idea of the enormity of the words he was speaking, he wouldn’t be saying them.

And this is not the sole person I know. There is this other gentleman (don’t know if I can call him that) who strongly and staunchly believes that no matter how greater heights I would achieve in my career, I would always remain below my husband. And that I should even accept if my future husband hits me sometime because after all my husband would also love me and hence he has the right to even get angry at me sometimes. Weird isn’t it?   

And what do you argue with such people? It rages you from inside when even the educated lot thinks like that. What could be expected from uneducated ones then?

I don’t know if the Universe is conspiring to make me meet such pea-size brained people again and again. But I tend to find them in herds. Or are they actually available in herds?

This post is written as a part of April A to Z Challenge 2014 under Non-Themed category. Themed posts for this challenge can be found here.

As the year goes by !!

Image Source: Obviously Google ;)

As the last few evenings of this year pass by

Reels of the past year swim through my eyes

The year that began with promises and new hope

The ones that I made when high on hope’s dope

Life swinging between extremes

Averageness, my life’s this year didn’t see

Lurking between bests and the worsts

There were some sad lasts and a few newborn firsts

Resolutions half done

Achieved a few, forgotten some

Nights when I cried myself to sleep

Attempts to understand life, oh so deep

Philosophers I could put to shame,

What mattered, who didn’t, for my miseries who was to be blamed

Writing journey this year I began

Shedding inhibitions, making blogger friends

Support in this new endeavor pouring from all ends

Health scares waking me up one fine day

Importance of it understood the harder way

When professional life seemed to be messy

There were friends who stood by like life’s blessings

Lost a best friend for life

Misunderstandings cutting relationships slowly like a blunt knife

Unnecessary Ego went for a toss

But not before creating a huge void, a magnanimous loss

Maturity I think, seeped my head a little

Breaking some notions, oh so brittle

Futile attempts to save a few close relations

The ones that made life come almost to stagnation

A handful of new friends garnered on the way

That made life bearable on harsh sunny days

Tried to be a better daughter, sister and human being

But couldn’t match the standards I set in the beginning

As another year goes by

Life slips like sand, unstoppable, however hard you try

So much had to be done

So much to be achieved, so much to be won

Regrets, Remorse of things undone

Sprinkled with a few happy moments in the year long run

As this year closes its shop

I stand again looking at horizon

Holding hope’s little fingers again

2014 - You better be a happy one

Myopic Me : 33 words

Myopic me

Never stopped dreaming though

Diva I dazzle

Appreciation I guzzle

Red Carpet walk

My shimmery gown flows

Camera wires tangle

Thud I fall

Entire world gazing

Damn, it was my basin

This post is written for Trifextra:Week Ninety-Seven. The prompt was to add thirty of our own words to the following three words for a total of thirty-three. The words were: myopic, dazzle, basin