Author: Paul Kalanithi
==I know a lot about back pain — its anatomy, it’s physiology, the different words patients used to describe different kinds of pain — but I didn’t know what it felt like==
In Perfect Health I Begin
The trip added a new dimension to my understanding of the fact that brains give rise to our ability to form relationships and make life meaningful. Sometimes, they break.
Moral speculation was punt compared to moral action.
With what strife and pains we come into the world we know not, but ‘tis commonly no easy matter to get out of it.
Would knowledge alone be enough, with life and death hanging in the balance? Surely intelligence wasn’t enough; moral clarity was needed as well.
Because the brain mediates our experience of the world, any neurosurgical problem forces a patient and a family, ideally with a doctor as a guide, to answer this question: What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?
When a patient comes in with a fatal head bleed, that first conversation with a neurosurgeon may forever color how the family remembers the death, from a peaceful letting go (“Maybe it was his time”) to an open sore of regret (“Those doctors didn’t listen! They didn’t even try to save him!“)
I acted not, as most often I did, as death’s enemy, but as it’s ambassador.
Cease Not Till Death
If I were writer of books, I would compile a register, with a comment, of the various deaths of men. He who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live — Michel de Montaigne, “That to Study Philosophy is to learn to die”
==The word “hope”, first appeared in English about a thousand years ago, denoting some combination of confidence and desire. But what I desired - life, is not what I was confident about - death==
As a doctor I knew not to declare “Cancer is a battle I am going to win!” or ask “Why me?” answer “Why not me?“.
Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical reproducible data but it's power to do so is predicated on its ability to grasp the most central aspects of human life hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue. Between these core passions and scientific theory, there will always be a gap. No system of thought can contain the fullness of human experience.
Paul dies.