“I had passed from the subject to the direct object of every sentence of my life. In fourteenth-century philosophy, the word patient simply meant “the object of an action,” and I felt like one. As a doctor, I was an agent, a cause; as a patient, I was merely something to which things happened. But in Emma’s office, Lucy and I could joke, trade doctor lingo, talk freely about our hopes and dreams, try to assemble a plan to move forward. Two months in, Emma remained vague about any prognostication, and every statistic I cited she rebuffed with a reminder to focus on my values. Though I felt dissatisfied, at least I felt like somebody, a person, rather than a thing exemplifying the second law of thermodynamics (all order tends toward entropy, decay, etc.).”
— When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
