Paul Kalanithi: A Tragic Hero

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How tragic would it be to spend 36 years training to be doctor, but then not being able to practice as a doctor? Well, that’s what happened to Paul Kalanithi. At age 36, on the verge of completing residency, Paul was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. All of his hard work to be a neurosurgeon-neuroscientist went down the drain. I think that’s really tragic and terrible. I wouldn’t want that to happen to me. Even though he was sick during his last year of residency, he wanted to finish residency. I was very surprised and I disapproved. Wouldn’t you want to spend time with your family if you knew you might die? Or wouldn’t you at least do something to help you live longer? I thought. I knew that I would have done one of those things. …show more content…

Later, after a lot of treatments/appointments for Paul, they realized that Paul’s sickness made them be more together. I wonder why that happened. Maybe in times of sad possibilities, people forget any separation or separation possibilities. I think that getting lung cancer would have made Paul understand his work better. Being a neurosurgeon, Paul faced people with pain every day. Now that he knew what it was like to have pain, he would have understood his patients better. Before and after he was sick, Paul thought a lot about the meaning of life and death. “How do you make sense of death? He thought then wrote. “What makes human life meaningful?” After reading a few of these “meaning of life and death wonderings” I began to wonder too. I thought about the real meaning of life and death. In my opinion, Paul approached death and lung cancer very well. When he found out that he had a new tumor, he wasn’t angry or scared. He wrote, “It simply was. It was a fact about the world.” When he was about to die, he said “I’m ready.” That makes me think that he was courageous and was ready to face almost everything that came his

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