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

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. Doctor Atul Gawande is a renowned surgeon, a Harvard professor, a writer for The New Yorker, and the bestselling author of many, many books, including the one we're gonna 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 doctor Guande 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 doctor Gawande on. So here he is, doctor Atul Gawande. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Dan. When my dad was still working, he was the head of radiation oncology at 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 to finally meet you. What's your dad's name? Jay Harris. Oh my god. Yes. I've shared patients with him. That's amazing. That's your dad. 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 impermanence. Tell him hello, but also you're going through what everybody goes through, dealing with a family member who's got significant challenges now. Yes. So so that brings us to to your book. Again, being mortal, just one of many many books you you've written. One of the big through lines in the book was your experience with your father. Maybe let's start there. Yeah. My father, was a surgeon who's also I'm a 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. And that began our three and a half year, almost four year journey with struggling through the condition he had and the life he would be …