The Role Of Paul Kalanithi In Breath Becomes Air

Medicine has been one of the most respected professions in society throughout the ages. Paul Kalanithi was called to medicine and devoted a third of his life to best serve his patients, yet medical school and residency began to transform Kalanithi’s mindset towards a “robotic” and apathetic approach. Truly, Kalanithi was not able to understand medicine from his patients’ perspective until he became terminally ill. When Breath Becomes Air integrates the reader into the story and asks the question as to whether a doctor can truly empathize with and best treat a patient unless he has personally needed medical care. Paul Kalanithi is able to confront death bravely and is able to cope with stage-four lung cancer because of the perspective that a …show more content…
The most obvious change in mindset is regarding the Kaplan-Meier curve for statistics. Kalanithi originally begs Emma to reveal his statistical chance at survival, but then is finally able to see the meaning behind mentioning “Most patients live many months to a couple of years” rather than saying “Median survival is eleven months” or “You have a ninety-five percent chance of being dead in a couple of years” (Kalanithi 95). He did “not understand [Emma’s] resistance” to disclosing the Kaplan-Meier values until Kalanithi himself defied the odds (Kalanithi 130). If he would have been told these odds from the beginning, he might not have had any desire to return back to surgery. By being forced into the role of a patient, he is able to understand that medical facts and statistics are not the sole determinants at play in a patient’s life. Kalanithi has grappled with the concept of death since he was a child, yet medical school hardened his outlook on life as he became obsessed with the mechanics of surgery. He came to detach himself from the intimate relationship with his patients because his “knowledge alone could be enough” to determine life and death, which he then described his role as a “grave digger with forceps” (Kalanithi 66). Later on he begins to further appreciate the sanctity of his role as a physician through his role as a terminally-ill patient, which led him to realize that “terminal illness is the perfect gift to that young man who had wanted to understand death” (Kalanithi 147). Overall, Kalanithi had to face his own mortality and try to understand what made his life worth living in order to fully understand the power that a physician