She felt the familiar calmness of an emergency, but she understood the falseness of that feeling, now that it was her life at stake.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEMy sense is that the wonderful technology that we have to visualize the inside of the body often leaves physicians feeling that the exam is a waste of time and so they may shortchange the ritual.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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According to Shiva, life is in the end about fixing holes. Shiva didn’t speak in metaphors. fixing holes is precisely what he did.
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Why is my leg broken on the ski trip and not anyone else’s?’ And I think that medicine has done a terrible job of addressing that spiritual violation.
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When you win, you often lose, that’s just a fact. There’s no currency to straighten a warped spirit, or open a closed heart, a selfish heart.
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There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, ‘You must read this.’
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For one who has an interest in the body as text, airports are treasure troves of information.
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I believe in black holes. I believe that as the universe empties into nothingness, past and future will smack together in the last swirl around the drain.
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The only way to know where you are is by where you have just been.
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Still, it’s an apt metaphor for our profession. But there’s another kind of hole, and that is the wound that divides family.
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If you keep saying your slippers aren’t yours, then you’ll die searching, you’ll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more.
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I think we can see how blessed we are in America to have access to the kind of health care we do if we are insured, and even if uninsured, how there is a safety net.
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We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.
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The bottom line: health care reform is about the patient, not about the physician.
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The process of learning huge volumes of information about disease, of learning a specialised language, can ironically make one lose sight of the patient one came to serve;.
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We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot.
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I had an uncle who, looking back, was probably not the most-educated physician around but he carried it off so well.
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When we cannot cure or save a life, our patients can at least feel cared for. It should be a basic human right.
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Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion.
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We aren’t even fighting disease. Its poverty. Money for food, medicines… that helps.
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Tell us please, what treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?”….I met his gaze and I did not blink. “Words of comfort,” I said to my father.
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I have been the apprentice, paid my dues, and have just become master of my ship. But when I look down, why do I see the ancient, tarred, mud-stained slippers that I buried at the start of the journey still stuck to my feet?
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Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.
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The flip side of suicide is that it leaves a lingering question in the minds of the people who survived. Its like a cancer thats metastasized. The suicide is the cancer and the metastasis is all these people saying, Why? Why? Why?
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The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.
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It’s an eerie feeling, as if my old mentor is not just in the room, but in my shoes, using me as his mouthpiece.
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We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.
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By visiting patients in their home, by helping them come to terms with their illness, I could heal when I could not cure.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE