When the Evidence Doesn't Look Like You Expected

In 2010, a young doctor named Paul Kalanithi was finishing his neurosurgery residency at Stanford — years of grueling work nearly behind him, a brilliant career ahead. Then came the diagnosis: stage IV lung cancer at age thirty-six. In his memoir When Breath Becomes Air, Kalanithi describes the disorientation of a healer suddenly becoming a patient. Everything he thought he knew about how life was supposed to unfold shattered against the reality of a hospital gown and a CT scan.…