This was another book I read pre-BSN. I was a working nurse and had been for 13 and a half years When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Karanthi was published January 12, 2016.
Admittedly this was mid-BSN course work but I just had to read it. I love neurosurgeon medical non-fiction, I always have. From the first one I read in 1997- When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales from Neurosurgery by Frank Vertosick Jr., MD. This goes along with the ditty that I learned in nursing school- when the air hits your brain you are never the same.
This is the story of a neurosurgeon resident before and after he is diagnosed with lung cancer in the final years of his training.
Neurosurgeon training is a loooonnnnggggg haul. The google results vary. Some call it 15 years after high school (includes a bachelors of some sort and medical school, internship and residency) and other programs clock it at 7 years (which is minus the bachelors years). In a simpler format, it is seven years after the undergraduate degree and the medical degree. Of course, type-A personalities that 100% of them are, there may be additional fellowship after the end of residency.
In short, you have to REALLY like cutting into people’s heads.
Or the aforementioned type-A personality.
Or just want to care for people who are sick and have no where else to turn.
Sit down.
I’m going to hold your hands and gently explain that I didn’t enjoy this book.
Like, at all.
Take your fingers off your pearls. It isn’t personal.
I get that Dr. Paul Kalanithi wrote this while he was actively fighting lung cancer and actively dying. And that his wife, Dr. Lucy Kalanithi wrote the final chapter explaining his death.
I understand.
I just don’t think it is that great a book.
Seriously.
I re-read it this past week to make sure that I still felt that way. Also I re-read it with the knowledge that I had finished two whole nursing degrees and am most of the way through the third in the intervening years.
There are entire passages of brilliance. I marked 11 pages of them.
This book is this man’s journey to coming to grips with a fatal disease. I can understand that.
I can also appreciate how they let his voice drive most of the way through the book. It starts off strong when he was a boy and stronger when he is in medical school, before petering out over the course of his illness. If this was intentional this is masterful editing. If this is not, it is still masterful storytelling.
My biggest pet peeve with this book is that it is over-confident in its own brilliance and the author is a huge name dropper. Granted most of the names dropped were author’s names but nurses were not named. Not once. His surgical nurses were only mentioned a handful of times, including the conversation about his long hours at the hospital that apparently the nurse didn’t understand? I bet she did. Oh, and they were always women, nameless women who didn’t understand the pressures on a rising neurosurgeon resident. My feminist heart didn’t like this one bit.
I appreciated how he let his patient’s be fully realized people in his mind. I find that is the best way to approach a patient. As if they are people too, not just a problem for him to do surgery on. This I liked.
But I kept thinking how one note the nurses were. In fact the only named women are his co-resident, his wife, and his oncologist. Otherwise they were referred to as the relation to him and his wife and his family. No, thank you.
I stand by my first impression of the book as a memoir of residency. That there were better instances out there. Even as a memoir of his death I give it an 8/10.
Would I read it again? Yes, and I have.
Would I shelve it on my bookshelves? Yes, and I have.
Would I recommend it? Yes, as a book on dying.
Dispatches from the Evening Shift 