If you are only working 8 hours a day, you are slacking
Training to become a surgeon is brutal. Neurosurgeon is even more so. But, really, It takes years of hard work and dedication to be good at anything.
8 hours a day won’t be enough.
First third of the book is boring
The author was a good kid, a great student from elementary school to graduate school. But that makes the first third of the book covering his childhood and youth years very boring. He didn’t go to rehab, was not part of gang, didn’t have a bad romance, or fought a war. There was no adventure until cancer. But maybe that was meant for a different audience, for example, his daughter.
I happened to be reading another book at the same time: Chasing The Light, which is about Oliver Stone’s early life. It offers much more interesting experiences and deeper thoughts about life.
The neurosurgeon experience is interesting
The most fun part of the book is the author’s experience as a neurosurgeon. But to be honest, I still forget most of it after one week of bad flu.
Is it right to have a child when you know you are dying soon?
This is the one question that I am still thinking about. If it was me, I wouldn’t ask for such sacrifice of my wife.
It was a deliberate decision to have a child after the cancer diagnosis, when the author lost the ability to have a child himself. Sure, it was a decision by the couple together. However, I’m still puzzled. You can call it love. But raising a child is an all consuming mission, which will place heavy burden on the single mother. The wife is still young, if she plans to remarry, she faces extra constraints too. And what about the child? Does she have the right to have a father during her childhood? Additionally, during the same time when the author was diagnosed with cancer, his wife was planning to separate from him. Their marriage was in crisis. With all that, I wonder if the wife would have second thoughts after many years of hardship.