January 5, 2026

Dear Atul Gawande,

Before reading Being Mortal, I believed professionalism, efficiency, and control defined good medical care. Volunteering in a progressive care unit (PCU) over the summer reinforced that belief. The hospital felt precise and purposeful, filled with beeping monitors, quick footsteps, and clipped conversations. I assumed distance was necessary, even humane. Your book compelled me to reconsider whether professionalism stripped of humanity can truly be called “care” at all.

In the PCU, my role was slim. I handed patients water or food, adjusted blankets, and sometimes stayed to talk if time allowed. Those moments felt almost out of place. Nurses were kind but busy, and interactions with patients—especially elderly ones—were brief and transactional. Needs were met but seldom acknowledged beyond that. I didn’t question it. I believed satisfaction was secondary to safety.

That certainty began to fall apart when I read about patients like Alice Hobson, whose final years were shaped by systems designed to manage risk rather than honor her wishes. Your argument that medicine often prioritizes survival and safety over meaning and autonomy echoed uncomfortably in my memories of the hospital. I began to recognize how frequently elderly patients were treated as problems to be managed rather than people to be understood. I wondered whether, if you had walked through that unit with me, you would have caught the same quiet deterioration of dignity you described in your book.

One morning, an elderly woman with dementia wandered out of her room and tried to leave the unit. Another patient repeatedly misplaced her belongings and asked for help finding them. In both cases, the response was efficient but dismissive. I overheard nurses joking, using words like “crazy” and “trash.” At the time, I told myself this was stress or burnout—and I still believe that explanation matters. These weren’t cruel people; these were professionals working inside a system that rewards speed, control, and emotional distance. Reading your book helped me see how easily that system can reduce patients to disruptions in a workflow, even when no harm is intended.

The moment that unsettled me most, however, did not occur in the PCU. It happened during a code blue in the intensive care unit (ICU) on the same floor. When a code blue is announced, nurses and doctors from both the PCU and ICU are called to respond. I remembered hearing the announcement and expecting urgency: running, shouting, and chaos. Instead, the nurses walked. Calmly. Slowly.

That was the first time I saw someone die. She was a woman in her thirties and a mom, and after forty-five minutes without a pulse, her death was called. I heard her family screaming from another room. Within minutes, the unit returned to normal. Conversations resumed. Charts updated. I understood that professionalism required composure, but watching how quickly grief was absorbed left me shaken. I wondered what you would say about how efficiently loss is contained so work can continue.
Later, a nurse confessed to me that laughter can be a coping mechanism—that medical professionals sometimes joke to survive emotionally. I don’t doubt that. Still, your book helped me see how easily coping becomes detachment. You write about how medicine avoids asking patients what matters most to them. Watching that ICU settle back into routine, I realized medicine also avoids asking what repeated loss should cost the people who witness it daily.

What Being Mortal ultimately changed for me was my understanding of medicine’s limits. When you write that “it’s perspective, not age, that matters most,” you challenge an assumption hospitals rarely question: that living longer is always the obvious goal. I now recognize how often care is provided without asking patients what they value when time is limited.

I still want to work in healthcare. But because of your book, I no longer believe that doing everything possible is the same as doing what is right. I am trying to carry that awareness with me: to slow down when the system values speed, to ask questions when protocols offer easy answers, and to notice when professionalism begins to replace compassion. Dignity, I now understand, is not an added comfort layered onto care; it is central to it.

Your book did not make me pessimistic about medicine. It made me more demanding of myself within it. I don’t yet know how to practice the kind of medicine you argue for or how to hold onto that awareness without burning out. But I know this: if I ever stop noticing when care loses its meaning (if I ever start walking instead of running when someone else’s life is ending), I will have failed long before I make a medical mistake. For teaching me to see that, I am deeply grateful. Thank you, Atul Gawande.

Sincerely,
Zak Hu