Love, Loss, and Legacy with Lucy Kalanithi, MD
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What is the purpose of this special off‑season Nocturnists episode and who is the guest?
Hi everyone, this is Emily Silverman, the creator and host of the Nocturneist Podcast, and I am posting this episode to say thank you for listening to season two of our show and to announce that we're already cooking up plans for season three, so stay tuned for that. Also to announce that we're in the process of sifting through the entries for our first ever storytelling contest on the theme of learning, and we plan announce the winner before the end of the month, so look out for that. And then also to post this episode, which is a special off-season episode, which was born uh several weeks ago when I got an email from some of the students at UCSF about their AOA gold-headed cane lecture. This is a lecture where the students at UCSF get the chance to invite a physician they admire to come and give a talk.
And this year they chose to honor the wonderful doctor Lucy Kelonathy from Stanford University, and I was lucky enough to be invited to be in conversation with her in the style of a fireside chat. You'll hear more about Lucy and her amazing accomplishments in the introduction that follows. But we had a wonderful conversation which touched on themes of the human body, space and time, illness and identity, prognosis, uncertainty, what it means to love your doctor or love your patients, the importance of community, physician burnout, and so much more. It's a conversation I've been thinking about ever since. And I figured, why not? release it as a special episode of The Nocturnous. So here it is. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Thank you so much for coming. We're really, really excited to introduce you all to this year's guest for the AOA Gold Headed Cain Lecture, Dr. Lucy Kalonathy. So Dr. Kalonathy is an internist on faculty at the Stanford School of Medicine and an advocate for culture change around end-of-life care. She's a graduate of the Yale School of Medicine and the UCSF Internal Medicine Residency Program. And is a fellow of the American College of Physicians, a member of the AOA National Medical Honor Society, and an honoree of Mass General Cancer Center's The 100. She has implemented novel healthcare delivery models across primary care, hospitals, and health systems, including as a postdoctoral follow-up in healthcare delivery innovative.
At Stanford's Clinical Excellence Research Center. She serves on leadership boards for TED Med, the Coalition to Transform Advanced Care, and the American College of Physicians. Dr. Kalanathy's husband, the late Dr. Paul Kalanathy, was the author of the New York Times number one best-selling memoir, When Breath Becomes Air. Together, Drs. Paul and Lucy Kalanathy inspire us to rethink how we approach. We approach suffering, death and life, and we're so excited to continue these conversations today. Dr. Kalonathy is joined today by Dr. Emily Silverman, an academic hospitalist at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. Dr. Silverman is the host and creator of The Nocturnists, a medical storytelling event and podcast, and is a writer who seeks out projects that resurrect the narrative soul of medicine.
She has published poems in the Examine Life Journal at the University of Iowa School of Medicine and has embarked on some exciting new writing projects with the support of a fellowship at the McDowell Colony. Her writing is uh animated by a deep-seated curiosity about science, human nature, and what it means to live and die well. So with that, please give a warm welcome to Dr. Lucy Kalonathy and Dr. Emily Silverman.
Well, I'm so excited to be here with you. We've met a couple of times, but I've just always wanted to sit down and talk to you at length, like over coffee or over dinner, and I feel like this is a pretty good surrogate for that. Um I wish we could do, as we were joking earlier, for three hours instead of thirty minutes. But um thank you so much for inviting me all of you uh to come and moderate this discussion with the amazing uh Dr. Lucy Kalanathy and congratulations to all of you for being just a couple of weeks, some of you from graduation.
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Chapters
3 chapters
1
What is the purpose of this special off‑season Nocturnists episode and who is the guest?
0:08–23:30
2
How does Lucy Kalanithi describe the moment she became a patient and its impact on her identity?
23:30–35:18
3
What does Lucy say about identity shifts when faced with a new illness or terminal diagnosis?
35:18–40:44