Before I go: A surgeon's thoughts on dying

[ridethecliche]

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So sad, but so well written...

http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2015spring/before-i-go.html

 

[NeuResurgens]

I know my opinion isn't original here, but I'm really sick of cancer taking people before their prime.

 

[f4reignbeauty]

wow

 

[NYCdude]

Thanks for posting.

Definitely hard to read.

 

[Doug Underhill]

Seeing Mega Man on his desk there was a painful reminder that people (roughly) my age who grew up with the same things I did are now adults who have to face the reality of growing old and dying of terminal conditions.

 

[ridethecliche]

As someone just pointed out in another recent thread, the author has sadly passed away:

http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-ne...surgeon-writer-paul-kalanithi-dies-at-37.html

 

[NeuResurgens]

While cancer has many preventable risk factors, it provokes a lot of fear because it is often depicted as entirely random, able to strike literally anyone at any age, regardless of personal characteristics. While there are a lot of things one can use to predict it, I still feel that there are always going to be those random healthy people who suddenly discover that they are going to die in less than a month. It is heartbreaking and infuriating at the same time.

 

[Finches]

"When you come to one of the many moments in life when you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing."


This made the little hairs on my neck stand up. What a grand example of the power of words.
A fellow YSM graduate, too. RIP.