Person Place Thing Show with Bunkhouse Boys
Person Place Thing interview with Dr. Lucy Kalanithi with music provided by Bunkhouse Boys
NYU Langone Medical Center
A live show of Person Place Thing with host Randy Cohen. The guest is Dr. Lucy Kalanithi, widow of Dr. Paul Kalanithi who wrote When Breath Becomes Air. There will be some musical interludes during the program with the Bunkhouse Boys.
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.