My Last Day as a Surgeon Analysis

My Last Day as a Surgeon by Paul Kalamithi

Setting

There are several settings in this reading. The settings are the neurosurgery office, the surgery room, and the hospital’s morning.

These settings create the views and the atmosphere of the very familiar place to the writer, surgery office, where he has been working for a long time. However, he feels the difference once he knows he will be a patient soon. The way he looks through the case has changed. The way he sees life as a distance from the sun to the Earth. The way he pays detail attention to the eucalyptus and pine outside the hospital that he never notices before. All of these tell us that he is trying to live the most out of his day. He wants to feel and do anything as he could.

Quotes:

(Around 8 P.M., I sat down in the neurosurgery office, next to a radiology viewing station)

(I was neither angry nor scared. It simply was. It was a fact about the world, like the distance from the sun to the Earth.)

(As I stepped out of my car at the hospital, at five-twenty the next morning, I inhaled deeply, smelling the eucalyptus and … was that pine? Hadn’t noticed that before.)

(The morning passed, and I scrubbed for my last case. Suddenly the moment felt enormous. My last time scrubbing? Perhaps this was it.)

Dialogue

The reading started right of with the dialogues of the author and the tech person. The main purpose is to give an eye catching and to bring the attention to the readers. It also makes the story more interesting to be read this way rather than start with a whole paragraph introduction.

Quotes:

(“Wanna take a look, Doc?” the tech said.

“Not right now,” I said. “I’ve got a lot of work to do today.”)

Internal Conversation

There is a one big internal conversation in this reading, and it is heart touching to the readers. Right after finishing the surgery for the last patient, the author was asked if he was going to work on any more cases. To a surgeon, this is a frequency and normal question....