02419cam a2200301 i 4500 296103616 TxAuBib 20160112120000.0 151022s2016||||||||||||||||||||||||eng|u 2015023815 9780812988406 081298840X TxAuBib rda Kalanithi, Paul. When breath becomes air [BOOK] / Paul Kalanithi ; foreword by Abraham Verghese. First edition. New York : Random House, 2016. 225 pages ; 19 cm. txt rdacontent n rdamedia nc rdacarrier At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality. What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir. Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’” Provided by publisher. 20191204. Kalanithi, Paul Health. Married people Biography. Neurosurgeons Biography. Lungs Cancer Patients United States Biography.