Paul Kalanithi's "When Breath Becomes Air" is a non-fictional book that anyone interested in a medical career will find invaluable. The author talks about his experience in a sort of autobiographical way where he had to face stage IV lung cancer in his last year of neurosurgical residency. This book was published after his death in January of 2016.
“The word hope first appeared in English about a thousand years ago, denoting some combination of confidence and desire. But what I desired—life—was not what I was confident about—death. When I talked about hope, then, did I really mean “Leave some room for unfounded desire?” No. Medical statistics not only describe numbers such as mean survival, they measure our confidence in our numbers, with tools like confidence levels, confidence intervals, and confidence bounds. So did I mean “Leave some room for a statistically improbable but still plausible outcome—a survival just above the measured 95 percent confidence interval?” Is that what hope was? Could we divide the curve into existential sections, from “defeated” to “pessimistic” to “realistic” to “hopeful” to “delusional”? Weren’t the numbers just the numbers? Had we all just given in to the “hope” that every patient was above average? It occurred to me that my relationship with statistics changed as soon as I became one.”
In the end, he became the very person he sought to treat and help. That is the biggest irony of all. Nevertheless, he took it as a learning experience and wrote his every thought to produce this well-written book.
Kalanithi's attempts to show through his journey that medicine isn't simply about eliminating a disease, but about understanding the human experience, that is exactly why I've taken a Psychology degree instead of a traditional scientific one.