Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?
-Henry David Thoreau
It is almost 7:00am I carry my briefcase and lunch bag from the car to my office. I nod to some of the night shift employees heading home. Another day has begun.
I type my password and check the computer, reminding myself of the twenty patients I am scheduled to see today ...
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Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.
-Jose Ortega y Gasset
The senior resident hauled our little band of medical students down to the radiology file room. As he dug through the heavy manila x-ray jacket searching for films, he told us the patient’s story. “This 63-year-old lady was really sick when she came in. Heart attack a couple of years ago. New trouble ...
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God helps those who help themselves.
-Something that sounds like truth but fortunately isn’t mentioned in any religious text
“I’m gonna beat this thing again, Doc! I just know it!”
Over the course of several years, I helped care for a man with a very rare cancer that recurred over-and-over. With each new tumor, he became more focused on beating the disease and despite the repeated setbacks, he remained eternally positive. He spent ...
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How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
-Annie Dillard
I wish I could add up all of the moments I spend waiting for things to happen.
I wait for computers to boot up. I wait for computer screens to load. I wait for programs to ask for and accept my user name and password for the umpteenth time so I can view a CT scan and then re-enter a different ...
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Skill to do comes of doing.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are in the last steps of getting surgery arranged; the counseling is complete and the consent is on the clipboard. Just as the patient is putting pen to paper, she asks, “When I’m asleep, you’re not going to let some trainee practice on me, are you? I mean, I wouldn’t let the brand ...
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Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.
- James Baldwin
She sits in the examination chair reeking of cigarette smoke. "I had a new sore under my tongue last week," she tells me. "It was bad."
A year ago, she finally developed a large throat cancer from her years of smoking and drinking. The cancer had spread to the neck lymph nodes and ...
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Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years.
- Simone Signoret
Allen’s cancer has continued to grow quickly. He raises his chin so I can see. I check my notes from a month ago and pull out my ruler and make new measurements. I jot down my findings and turn to look him in the eye. We both know this ...
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“I will never forget that day.”
She smiled broadly.
“It was about a week after my cancer surgery and I had finally worked up the courage to look in the mirror. I knew you had rearranged things a bit, okay. Moved stuff around. Taken things apart and jammed them all back together, right?”
I probably would not have said it quite like that, but she was correct that her surgery had involved removing part of her ...
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"Traveling makes one modest – you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world. "
-Gustave Flaubert
We have come to Kenya, expecting to work outside of our "comfort zones."
Our patient has arrived from miles away, riding on the back of her husband’s bicycle. She has an enlarging, bleeding mass growing off of the side of her neck. There are no pathologists available, so we are uncertain what kind of tumor ...
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"If I’d known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself."
-Eubie Blake
He leaned forward, energetically listening to my conversation with his daughter. There was more than one cancer treatment option. We reviewed everything and she asked what he could expect with either a major surgery or seven weeks of daily radiation treatments. Soon, both the father and daughter were peppering me with questions about ...
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"A comprehensive and extremely useful roadmap for doctors."
-Eric Topol, MD, author of The Creative Destruction of Medicine
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