When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author Name: Paul Kalanithi
- Book Genre: Autobiography, Biography, Health, Medicine, Memoir, Nonfiction
- ISBN # 9780812988406
- Date of Publication: 2016-1-12
- PDF File Size: 1.1 MB
- EPUB File Size: 352 KB
In Perfect Health I Begin
The hand of the LORD was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the LORD, and set
me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones,
And caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the
open valley; and, lo, they were very dry.
And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live?
—Ezekiel 37:1–3, King James translation
I KNEW WITH CERTAINTY that I would never be a doctor. I stretched out in
the sun, relaxing on a desert plateau just above our house. My uncle, a
doctor, like so many of my relatives, had asked me earlier that day what I
planned on doing for a career, now that I was heading off to college, and
the question barely registered. If you had forced me to answer, I suppose
I would have said a writer, but frankly, thoughts of any career at this
point seemed absurd. I was leaving this small Arizona town in a few
weeks, and I felt less like someone preparing to climb a career ladder
than a buzzing electron about to achieve escape velocity, flinging out
into a strange and sparkling universe.
I lay there in the dirt, awash in sunlight and memory, feeling the
shrinking size of this town of fifteen thousand, six hundred miles from
my new college dormitory at Stanford and all its promise.
I knew medicine only by its absence—specifically, the absence of a
father growing up, one who went to work before dawn and returned in
the dark to a plate of reheated dinner. When I was ten, my father had
moved us—three boys, ages fourteen, ten, and eight—from Bronxville,
New York, a compact, affluent suburb just north of Manhattan, to
Kingman, Arizona, in a desert valley ringed by two mountain ranges,
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