We all have concerns about life, death, and meaning at some point in our lives, and these questions frequently have a medical component. Paul and his wife were in the hospital, where they were both sobbing as the tests showed that cancer had spread throughout his body. Paul informed his wife that he would never want to pass away and urged her to get married again because he couldn't bear for her to be alone. Paul confided in Victoria that he thought he would never again work in a hospital as a doctor. One chapter of my life seemed to have ended, he said, adding that perhaps the whole book was closing, instead of being the person who aids in life transition, he felt like a sheep, lost and even confused. Cancer was a severe illness it was not only life changing but also life shattering, he had plans for his future, but with his condition, he felt the idea was collapsing. He was so familiar with death in his place of work, but this time it visited him, he felt it being so new and didn't know how to face it he should have followed the footsteps of his patients.
The strategy that has been used in this article is a metaphor, helps the audience to see things in a particular way from the writer's point of view, it also helps the audience to remember the key message from your presentation and sometimes even inject humor to your performance. Having spent a whole week bedridden, he grew weak to a point he couldn't get out of bed or if need be it took lots of effort and planning. There was the need to leave some items to ease his changing home like a modified toilet seat and foam blocks to support his legs while resting.
A paradox that goes a runner crossing finish line and ends up collapsing, this was just a clear evidence of his transforming life from being a great doctor who had the duty to take care of the ill he now becomes an invalid who was growing sicker a week after the CT scan, he seemed to be nearing death and this released him from his duties of serving patients as a neurosurgeon. When he had patients with external conditions he consulted about it, this was no different as he started reading about chemo.
The family of Paul indulged in all activities to help him in his transforming life from being a surgeon to being a patient, his father even encouraged him that all the modifications that were being made to him were capitulations and that he was going to beat the disease, but he didn't know what to say to him. Before his cancer was diagnosed Paul knew he was going to die but he didn't know when, but now it was acute, and it was a scientific one, he states that the facts about death are unsettling, but also there is no other way to live.
When they arrived one day he received a call and was told that he had a treatable mutation, chemo was off, and Tarceva became his treatment, he soon began to feel stronger, he felt a drop of hope, this is another strategy that helps to improve the article by adding styles to it, tells the audience of amount of confidence the writer when he learnt about how his health was growing due to the changes in his treatment.
The fog surrounding his life was rolling back each inch, and you could see a sliver of blue sky, this is imagery. The writer is trying to explain to the audience of how there were significant improvements in Paul's health; this helps to improve or make the article more captivating to the audience. His appetite returned, and he put o a little weight, he developed acne and this erased his handsome look but his wife loved his skin with or without acne, and he was happy to be ugly and alive.
Paul had to face his morality just as his patients, try to find an understanding of what made his life worth living, being torn between being a doctor and a patient, delving to medical science and finding answers from literature, while facing death and he has to rebuild his old life or find a new one. Describing life otherwise was like painting a tiger without the stripes, after so many years of living with death; Paul came to understand that not the most straightforward end was the best.
Death may be a onetime thing but having to live with a terminal disease is a process. Paul had managed to go through all the stages of grief successfully, the denial, anger, depression and the acceptance, but he did it the opposite way because at one time he was prepared for death, he accepted it, then grief he was going to die, but that was not soon after all. Flashes of anger he was angry of how well he had worked hard in his life just to end up with cancer, and then he arrived at total denial.
When you take up another's cross you must be willing to get crushed by its weight, Paul went back to the hospital at first he took the less amount of work due to his condition but later realized that it felt as though he was using cancer as an excuse, so he started operating until late night or into the early morning, his body was taking a beating, and when he gets home he was too tired to eat, he slowly upped the dose of Tylenol. Paul developed a cough that was persistent; the dead tumor caused it in his lungs.
The pain in failing led Paul to understand that in neurosurgery technical excellence was a requirement of morals, not only good intentions was enough, but also the skills were needed when Paul lost professorship at Stanford he thought of running a lab. But he realized later that a neurosurgeon requires at least a century to catch up with his right ambitions of understanding what their minds want, the lab wasn't where he wanted to spend the all his career in.
At one point he began to deteriorate, his diarrhea worsened and he was rehydrating, his liver was failing, his mouth was dry and he couldn't swallow or speak, he was transferred to the ICU, he was in pain. He was going to chemo again, and he had to be fed with fluids until the effects of chemo wore off. When the time came for him to be discharged he had lost forty pounds and he could see his bones through his skin, his hair had thinned. When trying to lift a glass of water, he had to use both hands.
But as his body is weakened by cancer, forcing him to abandon his heroic image he gathers his strength of the writing. During the absence of certainty in his life, he chose to assume that he was going to live long, saying goodbye to your child makes one's death painful and he asked Emma whether he should do it. The real question is not always about how long but how we live it and the answer to most of our problems does not appear in any medical book.
Everyone succumbs to finitude as Paul; most ambitions could be abandoned or achieved, either way, all that belongs to the past. The future should be a ladder to helping achieve goals of life but is a perpetual present; words had longevity Paul didn't have. When you come to the many moments in life where you are required to account for yourself, give a ledger of what you have always been and what you have done. Something that is satisfying and this is the time that is an enormous thing.
Works cited
Berry, L. (2017). When Breath Becomes Air by Kalanithi Paul, The Bodley Head
9781847923677 1847923674. Nursing Standard, 31(28), pp.34-34.
Kalanithi, Paul “When Breath Becomes Air”, Kindle Edition, p. 208
