User:Jagud012/sandbox

This is my user sandbox that I will be using to practice editing on Wikipedia.

Overview
In his last year of neurosurgical residency at Stanford University, Dr. Paul Kalanithi experiences negative changes in his health. Rapid weight loss, and severe back and chest pains begin to raise concern for him and his wife, Lucy. Paul worries that a possible cause for his symptoms is spinal cancer – almost unlikely for people in their thirties. However, when X-ray results in a routine medical check-up return looking just fine, his primary care physician and himself attribute the symptoms to aging and work overload. At thirty-six, Dr. Kalanithi had gained national prominence and become a respected member of the medical community. Determined to finish the last months of his residency, he ignores whatever symptoms have not subsided. A few weeks later, the symptoms come back, stronger than before. Around this time, Paul and Lucy experience a rocky moment in their relationship when Lucy feels that Paul is not communicating with her. Visiting friends in New York, Paul is almost certain that he has cancer and says it out loud for the first time to his friend Mike. Returning home, upon landing in San Francisco, Paul receives a call from his doctor telling him that his lungs “look blurry.” When he arrives home with Lucy, both of them know what is happening. The next day, Paul checks in to the hospital and the room where he examined his patients, delivering good and bad news, becomes his own. With this event, the future that Paul had worked so hard for these past years vanishes before his eyes.

Plot
Following the prospect of a better life, Paul’s father moves the family from Bronxville, New York to Kingman, Arizona when Paul is ten. A doctor himself, Paul’s father dedicates most of his time to medicine and is notably absent from the house. Believing that to be a doctor, he would have to be away from the family like his father, Paul becomes disenchanted with medicine. Although Paul and his two brothers enjoy the newfound liberty of their desert town, their mother constantly worries for their academic future in a town that the U.S. census has declared “the least educated district in America.” Unwilling to let anything halt their learning, she acquires college reading lists and instills in her sons a love for literature. The summer before heading to Stanford University for school, Paul reads Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S., by Jeremy Leven. The book’s idea that the mind is the result of the brain doing its work awakes a curiosity in Paul for neuroscience. After completing degrees in English literature and human biology, Paul feels there is still much to learn. He is accepted to a master’s program in English literature at Stanford, and one afternoon—pushed by his desire to understand the meaning of life— discovers the calling to practice medicine for the first time. Preparing to apply to medical school, Paul uses the time off to study the history and philosophy of science and medicine at Cambridge. He later starts medical school at Yale. During his time at Yale, Paul meets his wife, Lucy, and sees the patient-doctor relationship as an example of life, death, and morality coming together. After two years of classroom learning, Paul experiences his first birth and death in his ob-gyn clinical rotation, when a set of twins could not be carried to term. It is then that Paul understands that intelligence is not enough in the practice of medicine, and that morality is also needed. After medical school, Lucy starts internal medicine residency at UCSF and Paul neurosurgical residency at Stanford. Hard at first, Paul grows used to the rigor of neurosurgery and, in his fourth year, joins the neuroscience lab of a professor affectionately called “V.” In the sixth year of residency, Paul returns to his hospital duties and having reached professional recognition, he feels he has finally found his place in the world.