March 5, 2016

Photo by Suszi Lurie McFadden

This week’s special guest was Dr. Lucy Kalanithi, MD, FACP, the widow of Dr. Paul Kalanithi. Paul authored the critically acclaimed, #1 New York Times bestselling memoir, When Breath Becomes Air, for which she wrote the epilogue. An internal medicine physician and faculty member at the Stanford School of Medicine in Palo Alto, CA, she completed her medical degree at Yale, where she was inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha national medical honor society. She completed her residency at UC San Francisco, and a postdoctoral fellowship training in healthcare delivery innovation at Stanford’s Clinical Excellence Research Center.

Her medical career and personal experience intersected as she stood alongside her husband during his life, lung cancer diagnosis, treatment, and death. Dr. Kalanithi has special interests in healthcare value, meaning in medicine, patient-centered care and end-of-life care. She has appeared on PBS NewsHour, NPR Morning Edition, Yahoo News with Katie Couric, and has been interviewed for People Magazine, NPR, and The New York Times. She also wrote about life after Paul’s passing for The New York Times. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her daughter, Elizabeth Acadia.

Paul Kalanithi, M.D., was a neurosurgeon and writer. Paul grew up in Kingman, Arizona, before attending Stanford University. He graduated in 2000 with a B.A. and M.A. in English Literature and a B.A. in Human Biology. He earned an M.Phil in History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine from the University of Cambridge before attending medical school. In 2007, Paul graduated cum laude from the Yale School of Medicine, winning the Lewis H. Nahum Prize for outstanding research and membership in the Alpha Omega Alpha medical honor society. He returned to Stanford for residency training in Neurological Surgery and a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience, during which he authored over twenty scientific publications and received the American Academy of Neurological Surgery’s highest award for research. Paul completed his neurosurgery residency in 2014.

Paul’s reflections on doctoring and illness—he was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer in 2013, though he never smoked—have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Paris Review Daily, in addition to interviews in academic settings and media outlets such as MSNBC.

Podcast