An ally

Someone has lent me the book When breath becomes air, written by Paul Kalanithi. He was a highly talented neurosurgeon and neuroscientist (also a graduate in Eng. Lit.) who died of lung cancer in 2015 at the age of 37. The book was written as he was dying, so an epilogue by his wife Lucy has been added to bring the unfinished story to a close.

It's a poignant account of a reversal of roles, as doctor becomes patient and grapples with his own mortality and powerlessness. Those who have followed my earlier posts will understand when I say that the lines that most resonated with me were these, from Lucy's epilogue:

Paul faced each stage of his illness with grace - not with bravado or a misguided faith that he would "overcome" or "beat" cancer, but with an authenticity that allowed him to grieve the loss of the future he had planned, and forge a new one. [...] He let himself be open and vulnerable, let himself be comforted. Even while terminally ill, Paul was fully alive; despite physical collapse he remained vigorous, open, full of hope, not for an unlikely cure but for days that were full of purpose and meaning.

Aha, I sense an ally here! As a neurosurgeon Kalanithi had seen too much gruesome reality to dabble in false hope and fantasy. He put his faith in the best that medicine had to offer, and then accepted whatever came. For a while it looked like chemotherapy might pull him through, but when a routine scan showed a new tumour which "looked, oddly, like a full moon having almost cleared the horizon", this was his reaction:

I was neither angry nor sad. It simply was. It was a fact about the world, like the distance of the sun to the earth. I drove home and told Lucy.

And earlier in the book, he writes:

As a doctor, I knew not to declare "Cancer is a battle I'm going to win!" or ask "Why me?" (Answer: "Why not me?").

Everyone is different, and there are people for whom it would be impossible in those circumstances to say "I was neither angry nor sad" - or scared, for that matter. Paul comes across at times as almost superhuman, and I wondered if he was telling us all the truth - was he not tempted at least once or twice to say "F***, this is awful", or "S***, I'm terrified"? Lucy assures us in the Epilogue that this "beautiful, focused man, [...] frail but never weak" was the real deal, and perhaps we should take her word.

But however he reacted, Paul's refusal to see himself as some sort of heroic exceptional survivor, or to mount a one-man moral crusade against his disease allowed him to go on and write a book which has touched thousands of people. Far from "losing his battle with cancer", in his attitude of acceptance and grace, he became a winner. And I guess that's what I'm wanting to reiterate.

Well, having already spent a whole post fulminating about this topic a few weeks ago, I would probably be well advised not to labour the point any further!

Meanwhile, I stumble along, with enough energy to get up the stairs two or three times a day, and to walk round the garden three times. The rest of the day sees me lying in bed or on the sofa, reading, sleeping, writing emails, doing crosswords, looking at stuff on the Net. Fortunately, I've always been exceptionally good at doing nothing, and it's a skill which is now coming in very handy...

See you next time.