03445cam a2200385 4500 282877504 TxAuBib 20170120120000.0 151022s2016||||||||||||||||||||||||eng|u 2015023815 9780812988406 081298840X (OCoLC)909925278 TxAuBib Kalanithi, Paul. When breath becomes air / Paul Kalanithi ; foreword by Abraham Verghese. First edition. New York : Random House, [2016] ℗2016. xix, 228 pages : 1 illustration ; 19 cm. Foreword / by Abraham Verghese -- Prologue -- In perfect health I begin -- Cease not till death -- Epilogue / by Lucy Kalanithi. "At the age of 36, on the verge of a completing a decade's worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi's health began to falter. He started losing weight and was wracked by waves of excruciating back pain. A CT scan confirmed what Paul, deep down, had suspected: he had stage four lung cancer, widely disseminated. One day, he was a doctor making a living treating the dying, and the next, he was a patient struggling to live. Just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined, the culmination of decades of striving, evaporated. With incredible literary quality, philosophical acuity, and medical authority, When Breath Becomes Air approaches the questions raised by facing mortality from the dual perspective of the neurosurgeon who spent a decade meeting patients in the twilight between life and death, and the terminally ill patient who suddenly found himself living in that liminality. At the base of Paul's inquiry are essential questions, such as: What makes life worth living in the face of death? What happens when the future, instead of being a ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present? When faced with a terminal diagnosis, what does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another one fades away? As Paul wrote, "Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn't know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn't know when. But now I knew it acutely. The problem wasn't really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live." Paul Kalanithi passed away in March 2015, while working on this book"-- Provided by publisher. On the verge of completing a decade's worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. Just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. Kalanithi chronicles his transformation from a naïve medical student 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. 20170120. Kalanithi, Paul Health. Lungs Cancer Patients United States Biography. Neurosurgeons Biography. Husband and wife. BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. MEDICAL / General. SOCIAL SCIENCE / Death & Dying. Biographies. Verghese, Abraham, writer of foreword. TXDIC