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the oncology bargain. In return for the chance of a few
more months or years of life a patient dutifully agrees to chemotherapy, or radiation, or surgery, or whatever else an aggressive oncologist may offer. From his training in neuro-oncology, Kalanithi was certainly very familiar with survival statistics, particularly Kaplan-Meier curves. In
a New York Times opinion piece written after his cancer imploring his oncologist to give him some idea where his data point likely falls on a Kaplan-Meier curve. She adamantly refuses, although she realizes that he’s done his own research.
be left wide open and “the angst of facing mortality had no remedy in probability.”
and vitality that it gives him a renewed sense of duty that
resident. Eventually, he faces the cruelty of time as it brings
the early love that he had for his wife, also a physician. They decide to have a child despite the grim prognosis, “celebrating living, not dying.”
Seeking solace and comfort he returns to his intellectual
meaning in Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward and in the works of Woolf, Kafka (he wrote cynically that the meaning of life is that it stops) and Montaigne.
Joan Didion in her book The Year of Magical Thinking wrote about the sudden death of her husband as: “Life changes in an For Paul Kalaminthi his life-altering illness was not so abrupt; unsentimentally faced a slow slide to an untimely death and with undimmed courage he shared his last precious moments with the readers of this remarkable tour de force.
Paul Kalaminthi died on March 9, 2015. When Breath Becomes Air was published posthumously.
CONTRIBUTING AUTHOR
■ JAMES F. LALLY, MD is a retired Radiologist and a member of the Medical Society of Delaware Editorial Board.
Del Med J | June 2016 | Vol. 88 | No. 6
