Paul Kalanithi Quotes

By visiting patients in their home, by helping them come to terms with their illness, I could heal when I could not cure.

My mother did not want cancer to interfere with my life, as she knew it would eventually end hers.

When you go through a long illness, certainly one of cancer, there's a certain release from it and relief that it has come to an end, because the suffering can be unbearable, as opposed to an abrupt stop to life when they go out the door and there's a loved one who never comes home because of some accident.

If we include hedonistic philosophy in hospitals, the lives of patients suffering from cancer would be much, much better.

First-class delivery of children's palliative care is life-changing. When families are confronted with the shattering news that their children have a life-limiting condition, their world can fall apart.

I believe we should support people to live, and I am therefore in favour of good quality palliative care.

The bulk of my learning - if I may call it such - has come within the past three months, after I became a part of the fragile body of patients who make up an AIDS hospice. Here, surrounded by teams of supportive nurses, attentive doctors, and interns, one gently comes upon his own strengths and shortcomings.

Palliative care is something that you don't know you need until you're in the space where you need it, either from someone who has a terminal disease, like my mother, or for people who live with chronic disease and have particular issues that need care.

Around-the-clock support is crucial for children receiving palliative care. They and their families often need help every hour of every day, both in hospices and at home.

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

Cure sometimes, treat often, comfort always.

Cancer victims who don't accept their fate, who don't learn to live with it, will only destroy what little time they have left.

My father was in terrible pain towards the end because of his bed sores, and he did go into hospice, and I think that was better in some ways. You know, I think his death was peaceful, and it was all right. He was just in terrible pain.

I have learned that delivering the best possible palliative care to children is vital, providing children and their families with a place of support, care and enhancement at a time of great need is simply life-changing.

There's never been a doctor who served many patients who, despite their best efforts, did not lose some of them to death. But they understood that was part of life itself.

My mother battled cancer for 12 years before losing her fight.

Wait for them to die

I have sat with countless patients and families to discuss grim prognoses: It's one of the most important jobs physicians have. It's easier when the patient is 94, in the last stages of dementia, and has a severe brain bleed. For young people like me - I am 36 - given a diagnosis of cancer, there aren't many words.

Bodily discomfort and emotional fear and attachment make the dying uncomfortable and fearful. So, to help those dying people, I think modern medical science has a lot of facilities to reduce pain, or perhaps not to reduce pain, but not to experience pain.

We all have somebody in our lives, that however closely related or not, is affected by terminal illness and these amazing nurses, who often work through the night with people, not only suffering from a terminal illness but their families, they're just extraordinary people.

When we, doctors, ask patients what their priorities are if time is short, what we do is we use what is available to us - whether it's geriatric care or palliative care or hospice care - to make sure they're living the kind of life that they want to live.

I'm dying, but otherwise I'm in very good health.

I have not often seen much dignity in the process by which we die.

Dying people don't need medicine, the ones who remain do.

If I learnt anything at all about terminal illness in my research, it's that the experience is different for everyone. I do believe that life becomes concentrated when it's boundaried and that death is the biggest boundary of all.