Dr. Paul Kalanithi - neurosurgeon and writer

Who was creative and what did they do?

    My creative is Dr. Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon and writer. He earned both a master's in English literature and his medical degree in neurosurgery. I read his memoir for my bioethics class, and I find his approach to patient focused care is heavily inspired by his love of literature. He carefully picks his words when addressing patients and their families to discuss life-altering diagnoses. Dr. Kalanithi pioneers the connection between literature and the arts to neurosurgery and medicine. After he developed lung cancer, he turned to literature to help understand his own mortality. He wrote his memoir to tell his story and comment on the current medical system’s treatment of medical students, residents, and patients. His book is an amazing story of compassion, literature, and the doctor-patient relationship.

What leads the person to the discovery, invention, or idea (what was the creative process)?

    His creative process heavily references the scientific process where he starts with a literature review and ends by testing through real world experience. His creativity, specifically his memoir and medical practice style, directly mirrors literature’s influence on his passions and life in general. Throughout the text, he discusses his main takeaways from classic literature through analysis or quotes. For example, he describes his experience after his anatomy lab, “Descriptions like Nuland’s convinced me that such things could be known only face-to-face. I was pursuing medicine to bear witness to the twinned mysteries of death, its experiential and biology manifestations: at once deeply personal and utterly impersonal” (34). This longing to understand the connection between death, meaning, and medicine is his main fuel for writing and practicing neurosurgery. A deep philosophical question that not even literature, in this example Nuland’s How We Die, can answer. This shows his dedication to answering this question, but also how he values real world experience over simple text. 

 

He frequently uses story-telling elements like metaphors, flourished descriptions, and an omnipresent narrative style which STEM centered books and research articles avoid like the plague. One example of his flourished text is the following quote: “All medicine, not just cadaver dissection, trespasses into sacred spheres. Doctors invade the body in every way imaginable. They see people at their most vulnerable, their most sacred, their most private” (Kalanithi 38). Kalanithi consistently discusses the morality and sacredness of human experience and medicine. He uses sacred twice in this one section to demonstrate the immortal, awe-inspiring, yet mixed emotions to his readers during dissection. The word invades gives off a negative connotation while the sacredness gives a sort of ethereal light to medicine and the power at the end of his scalpel. He also brings his words to his practice, especially when he must break a particularly tough diagnosis to a couple. “Based on the scan, there was no doubt in my mind that this was glioblastoma – an aggressive brain cancer, the worst kind. Yet I proceeded softly, taking cues from Mrs. Lee and her husband. Having introduced the possibility of brain cancer, I doubted they would recall much else” (Kalanithi 58). He does not flourish his words like when he writes, but he still chooses them carefully to ensure the best possible situation. By overwhelming the Lees, he would only ruin his chance to perform a life-saving surgery. He does not shirk his responsibility as patient denial or overload them without contemplating the consequences. He genuinely cares about his patients and uses his love of literature to inspire his compassionate explanation.

What themes and principles from your focus book connect to your creative?

I feel like Dr. Kalanithi and Cave from Faith, Hope, and Carnage have very similar themes of death and the spirituality of art. Cave lost his son as he was finishing Ghosteen. Cave describes this experience as both heart retching and awe-inspiring due to the deja vu from the lyrics in his album. The songs in this album seemingly predict what was to come and have a raw, unfiltered depiction of complicated emotions and stories.

Cave uses his music to cope with the loss of his son and Dr. Kalanithi uses words to help his patients and eventually himself cope with life-changing diagnoses. The two quotes below show how art and creativity can be used to help people cope with grief. Cave creates a world to memorialize his son in his album, while Dr. Kalanithi uses his words to shape the world his patients’ families create to cope loss. I find this world-building very fascinating since it demonstrates how similar their creative process is. Both Cave and Dr. Kalanithi use words to convey a heartfelt, genuine message about the human experience. They also both have extrinsic motivations to create and help others cope with difficult situations.

“They recur throughout the record, alongside the idea of the migratory spirit, the Ghosteen that passes from image to image, and from song to song, threading them together. For me, the record became an imagined world where Arthur could be” (Cave 19).

“When a patient comes in with a fatal head bleed, the first conversation with a neurosurgeon may forever color how the family remembers from a peaceful letting go (“Maybe it was his time”) to an open sore of regret (“Those doctors didn’t listen! They didn’t even try to save him!”) When there’s no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon’s only tool” (Kalanithi 55).