The Skinny: May Reads
The last three months have flown by - does anybody else feel that way? Why is it that when you want time to pass more quickly it seems to drag on forever and when you want time to slow down it pases you by in the blink of an eye? This coming week's major highlights include my last day of work and departing for our vacation to Greece! We will be Athens, Santorini, and Crete for three days each. When we return, I'll get 3 days of rest before heading down to New Orleans for Memorial Day weekend with my best friends from high school.
Am I ready to go back to school? Absolutely. Am I ready to say goodbye to my friends and family here? Not so much. I'm trying to savor in every last minute that I get to spend with them. I'm also trying to get as much R&R in before heading back to the classroom. I've picked up yoga again in the last month and am hoping to continue to grow my practice through the summer. Coming back to it after being away for a few years has been really transformative. The way that I approach my practice has completely changed in a way that brings more mindfulness, calm, and understanding into my life. My practice before was driven by pretty shallow reasons, so it's really rewarding to be finding more depth in my meditation this time around. As promised, here is my review for Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air!
When Breath Becomes Air Paul Kalanithi, 256 pages
This memoir starts with a foreword from Abraham Verghese, another well-known physician-writer. Verghese's Cutting for Stone is stunning - you'd be hard-pressed to find another novel with similar depth and richness of plot, characters, and language. It may be the best work of fiction written by a man of medicine. That being said, Verghese's lyrical prose infuses the foreword and sets a pretty high bar for Kalanithi.
Kalanithi recounts his diagnosis, treatment, and eventual decline with lung cancer. In the end, I felt that the memoir read a lot like The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. While Kalanithi makes much more liberal use of literary flourishes throughout his book, the undercurrent of both texts seem similar. Kalanithi grapples with his diagnosis as he nears the completion of his neurosurgical residency training. After his first round of treatment, he is able to return to surgery. Eventually, Kalanithi's tumor returns with a vengeance and he is forced to, once again, give up surgery and return to the hospital. He talks about finding purpose, finding the things that make a life meaningful, and finding hope even where there seems to be none.
The memoir, unfortunately, did not resonate as well with me as it did with some of my peers. The novel's contents were, by and large, a very standard account of one man's experience dying, with the added flare that said person happens to be a physician. That being said, Kalanithi did share some very poignant pearls of wisdom about a physician's responsibility in guiding and supporting a patient throughout the dying process. Overall, I'd say it's worth a read (because every single one of my friends in medical school has recommended this book to me), but expect something in the vein of The Last Lecture with a slightly more condescending author. I wouldn't expect anything less from a neurosurgeon!
I'm trying to power through Eurydice Street before leaving for Greece this Saturday! Written by Sofka Zinovieff, it's a charming travel memoir about the author's time in the suburbs of Athens. In trying to lead as authentic a Greek life as possible, the author recounts the many obstacles (legal, social, and otherwise) that stood in her way. Next up on the list? The Architect's Apprentice. Here's hoping that I don't have to return the book to the library before getting back from vacation!
