What's Worth Living For? | Dr. Atul Gawande

Dan Harris (0:03)

Hey, everybody, welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. I am your host, Dan Harris. As a Buddhist, I am simultaneously galvanized by and terrified by the unavoidable fact of death. Galvanized because being aware of your mortality can make life more vivid and vibrant in the present moment. And terrified because, like, who's not afraid of dying? Today, though, I'm talking to a very famous doctor who argues that we can make this process which, again, is coming for all of us, much more humane. Dr. Atul Gawande is a renowned surgeon, a Harvard professor, a writer for The New Yorker, and the best-selling author of many, many books, including the one we're going to focus on today, which is called Being Mortal.

Now, you might be thinking, didn't Being Mortal come out in 2014?

Yes, it did. But that was before I had a podcast, and I've been meaning to have Dr. Gawande on the show for a long time. And then I found an excuse because just a few months ago, The New York Times listed Being Mortal as one of the top five books that will lift you up in hard times, which reminded me that I wanted to have Dr. Gawande on. So here he is, Dr. Atul Gawande. Welcome to the show.

Atul Gawande (1:13)

Thanks for having me, Dan.

Dan Harris (1:14)

When my dad was still working, he was the head of radiation oncology at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and he used to rave about this brilliant young surgeon who was writing articles for The New Yorker and I should read those articles, and he was talking about you. So it's very nice to finally meet you.

Atul Gawande (1:34)

What's your dad's name?

Dan Harris (1:35)

Jay Harris.

Atul Gawande (1:37)

Oh my God. Yes. I've shared patients with him.

That's amazing. That's your dad.

Dan Harris (1:42)

He's in a very different situation than when you knew him. He's had a lot of health problems. He had a stroke and has a form of Parkinson's, so he's sometimes walking a case study in permanence.

Atul Gawande (1:55)

Tell him hello, but also you're going through what everybody goes through, dealing with a family member who's got significant challenges now.

Dan Harris (2:05)

Yes. So that brings us to your book.

Again, Being Mortal, just one of many, many books you've written. One of the big through lines in the book was your experience with your father. Maybe let's start there.

Atul Gawande (2:20)

Yeah. My father was a surgeon who saw, so I'm a surgical oncologist at the Brigham and Dana-Farber in Boston. My father was a urologist. My mother was a pediatrician there. I grew up in Athens, Ohio, and he developed a tumor in his brain stem and spinal cord that started causing him to have pain in his neck and a scan revealed a tumor that was too large to actually remove.

That became our three and a half year, almost four year journey with struggling through the condition he had and the life he would be facing with it. There were things that could be done.

There was operations, biopsies that could be offered, chemotherapy, radiation. He would take some of those choices. He would decide not to take other of those choices. But what struck me was we had over 100 years of medical training between the three of us and my sister coming in as well as a non-medical person.

We were no better equipped than anybody else to navigate it. I started writing the book really because I had reached a point in my career when I was confident that if you had a problem I could fix, I could give you a great chance at fixing it. But come to me with a problem like the kind of problem my father had, and I was uncomfortable and I didn't know even what it meant to be good at taking care of people let alone actually being good at it. Getting to write was an excuse to start talking to people. It's strange to go as a doctor up to people and say things like, hey, can I come watch you a geriatrician in your office today? Or can I go follow you a patient as you navigate things at home? But when you're writing an article or then writing a book, you're allowed to do those things. It was an amazing opportunity. I ultimately interviewed over 200 people, practitioners, patients, family members, as they all coped with these kinds of problems.

Dan Harris (4:48)

You talk about this in the book. Very few of us like to talk about death or to think about it. And yet, as I mentioned in the introduction, The New York Times listed Being Mortal as one of the top five books to read when you need to be lifted up in hard times. Why? What is it about thinking about death in the right way that can be uplifting?