Friday Roundtable: A young doctor confronts his own death

Paul Kalanithi spent more than a decade training to be a neurosurgeon. By the final year of his residency, he'd examined hundreds of patients' CT scans.

But one day, the scan in front of him showed a dire diagnosis. The lungs were filled with tumors, the spine was deformed. These were signs he'd learned to read: It was cancer.

"This scan was different," Kalanithi writes. "It was my own."

Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer at age 36. His future transformed in an instant, from doctor to patient. Married with a young a daughter, he struggled with the diagnosis, but he didn't stop working. Even after undergoing chemotherapy, he returned to his residency — and to his roots in literature.

Before graduating from the Yale School of Medicine, Kalanithi studied English literature at Stanford, earning his Bachelors and Masters degrees in the subject. As he confronted his terminal diagnosis, he sat down to write. His essays in the Washington Post and The New York Times about life and mortality reached millions of readers.

Kalanithi died in March of last year at age 37, less than two years after reading his own scan. His memoir, "When Breath Becomes Air," was released in January. In it, Kalanithi attacks the big questions: What does it mean to live a full life? And what does life look like in the face of death?

For the Friday Roundtable, MPR News host Kerri Miller invited three people with ties to the medical field to read Kalanithi's book and reflect on the lessons he offers. Syl Jones, a playwright and resident fellow in narrative medicine at Hennepin County Medical Center; the Rev. Dr. Deb DeMeester, a clinical faculty member at the University of St. Thomas; and Dr. Mahmoud Nagib, the president of Neurosurgical Associates, Ltd., joined the conversation.

For the full discussion on "When Breath Becomes Air," use the audio player above.

When Breath Becomes Air When Breath Becomes Air