At 36 years Kalanithi was on the home stretch of completing his residency after working for 7 years as a neurosurgeon at Stanford University when he was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. Growing up, he had seen himself become a writer, only to end up picking the scalpel. He hungered for knowledge. Kalanithi was entangled in and wanted a deeper understanding of the moral quagmire heralded by humanity and wanted a front seat at this revelations and in his quest ended up a physician, a neurosurgeon, where it all happens.
We pick his mind through his writings as he opens up the world of doctors, their tumultuous jobs, and their imperfections at work. He dawns the face of a practitioner who understands his patients’ woes, especially those at the brink of death and whose fate he holds. He notes that in practice doctors are not only faced with the difficult task of saving lives but moral and social responsibility to make judgment calls on issues of life and death. He unmasks a job that he convinces us is more of a calling than a job.
Kalanithi was a scholar of unmeasurable standard, bagging multiple degrees and accolades almost effortlessly, yet faced death at a young age. His visit to his oncologist dampens his hope towards life as revelations indicate the presence of another tumor that wasn’t present during the initial scan. It also indicates the strained and difficult relations doctors have with their patients. The significance of his appearance was that specialists are so occupied and overpowered in their lives with such huge numbers of patients that they barely can bear to construct a ‘human’ association with the patients, endeavoring to comprehend their points of view, their worries, and tuning in to whatever they need to state.
When the ‘kill switch’ of his career is struck and moves from savior to patient, he reminisces the relationship he had with his patients while in practice. It is human nature to set goals and future ambitions. Paul feels that the terminal ailment has cut short his life and ended his career. He shows frustration at not knowing where to start once he is out of practice.
Like any of us endeavoring to experience our best lives, he was torn on which course to control his objectives. On the off chance that he had 20 years to live, he’d return to surgery, five years he would write. This inquiry tormented him through the underlying treatment that had the capacity to settle his tumor and enabled him to come back to the working room.
His life was advancing, with a kid on its way and nearing residency graduation, when an output uncovered another tumor. In spite of what every other person was stating, Kalanithi realized it was the start of the end. He left medication and practice to invest energy with his family and compose.
Paul realized he was in a race against time due to terminal malignant growth. However, he chose to compose this book in months going before his demise, when he was at that point extremely sick since he wanted to make a critical commitment by composing this book.
What’s more, to Paul, there was no preferred method to comprehend demise over to have the down-to-earth understanding of being with patients when they were sick and now and again in their withering beds; to be in those last minutes and help patients experience that troublesome timeframe.
However, we overlook that we probably won’t get that ‘future’. Death is inescapable; we as a whole know it. Perhaps factually that is a practical supposition, yet there’s as yet a sound likelihood we may pass on sooner. Along these lines, rather than endeavoring to achieve that purpose of ‘flawlessness’ before successfully leave a positive effect on earth, we should attempt to do however much good as could reasonably be expected from the underlying days, taking into account that there’s no certification to what extent we will live. Truly, the existence objectives will change in the voyage, there will be distinctive open doors at various occasions; however we generally have the decision of taking the way which probably won’t be the most agreeable life by and by, yet it will be the way which will allow you to have the best positive effect. Rather than composing papers and letting ourselves know and others that we are planning for the life of administration ahead, we can begin at this moment! That does not be that as it may, mean relinquishing training.