I’ve spent almost a third of my life preparing for it. “The tricky part of illness is that, as you go through it, your values are constantly changing. After I was caught returning at dawn from one such late-night escapade, my worried mother thoroughly interrogated me regarding every drug teenagers take, never suspecting that the most intoxicating thing I’d experienced, by far, was the volume of romantic poetry she’d handed me the previous week.”“Shouldn’t terminal illness, then, be the perfect gift to that young man who had wanted to understand death?” “I had a nagging sense that there was still far too much unresolved for me, that I wasn’t done studying.”“Here you are, violating society’s most fundamental taboos (cadaver dissection), and yet formaldehyde is a powerful appetite stimulant, so you also crave a burrito.” “My life had been building potential, potential that would now go unrealized.


“Literature not only illuminated another’s experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection. We would hit the trail at two A.M., summiting the nearest peak, Mount Tallac, just before sunrise, the clear, starry night reflected in the flat, still lakes spread below us. When Breath Becomes Air Introduction + Context. How could I ever learn to make, and live with, such judgment calls?”“I expected to feel only empty and heartbroken after Paul died. This was the life he was given, and this is what he made of it. The secret is to know that the deck is stacked, that you will lose, that your hands or judgment will slip, and yet still struggle to win for your patients. “We shall rise insensibly, and reach the tops of the everlasting hills, where the winds are cool and the sight is glorious.” Share. We had assumed an onerous yoke, that of mortal responsibility. But now I don’t know what I’ll be doing five years down the line. When Breath Becomes Air Part 2: Cease Not till Death Summary & Analysis | LitCharts. It was as if this were the moment God said, “Let there be light!” You could not help but feel your specklike existence against the immensity of the mountain, the earth, the universe, and yet still feel your own two feet on the talus, reaffirming your presence amid the grandeur.” All at once, it dawned on her and she began to cry: wherever this “practice EKG” had come from, the patient had not survived. You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”“In this room, I had sat with patients and explained terminal diagnoses and complex operations; in this room, I had congratulated patients on being cured of a disease and seen their happiness at being returned to their lives; in this room, I had pronounced patients dead . The day sky would spread wide and high, until the first ray of the sun made an appearance. When Breath Becomes Air Quotes Showing 1-30 of 656 “You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.” ― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air. But on the periphery of these two narratives, Paul relays stories of his childhood and the importance of his family. . You can't ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”

Instead, I knew I was going to die—but I’d known that before. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Weren’t the numbers just the numbers?

Anatomy lab, in the end, becomes less a violation of the sacred and more something that interferes with happy hour, and that realization discomfits. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.”“The tricky part of illness is that, as you go through it, your values are constantly changing.
We’d love your help. “Everyone succumbs to finitude. The squiggly lines on that page were more than just lines; they were ventricular fibrillation deteriorating to asystole, and they could bring you to tears.”“When you come to one of the many moments in life when you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests, satisfied. "Don't you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?"

Give me ten years, I’d get back to treating diseases. I remember thinking ‘You must remember this,’ because what was falling on my retina was precious. When Breath Becomes Air is a memoir written by the late neuroscientist Paul Kalanithi. It never occurred to me that you could love someone the same way after he was gone.”“I recall the sun filtering through the magnolia tree outside my office and lighting this scene: Paul seated before me, his beautiful hands exceedingly still, his prophet’s beard full, those dark eyes taking the measure of me .

Tell me one year, I’d write a book. So did I mean “Leave some room for a statistically improbable but still plausible outcome—a survival just above the measured 95 percent confidence interval?” Is that what hope was? For us, for our patients: it is our fate as living, breathing, metabolizing organisms.

Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.” “All the idylls of youth: beauty manifest in lakes, mountains, people; richness in experience, conversation, friendships. Teacher Editions … Death may be a one-time event, but living with terminal illness is a process.”“I knew medicine only by its absence—specifically, the absence of a father growing up, one who went to work before dawn and returned in the dark to a plate of reheated dinner.”“It’s very easy to be number one: find the guy who is number one, and score one point higher than he does.”“Being with patients in these moments certainly had its emotional cost, but it also had its rewards. Nights during a full moon, the light flooded the wilderness, so it was possible to hike without a headlamp. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when.


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