In America, we have always taken it as an article of faith that we ‘battle’ cancer; we attack it with knives, we poison it with chemotherapy or we blast it with radiation.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEIt’s an eerie feeling, as if my old mentor is not just in the room, but in my shoes, using me as his mouthpiece.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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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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The bottom line: health care reform is about the patient, not about the physician.
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She felt the familiar calmness of an emergency, but she understood the falseness of that feeling, now that it was her life at stake.
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He had so many ways of climbing into the tree house in his head, escaping the madness below, and pulling the ladder up behind him.
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Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school – not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical.
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I was taking care of people my age who were dying. The constant feeling, hearing from them, was that life is transient and can end very quickly, so don’t postpone your dreams.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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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When I use the word ‘healing’, by that I mean that every disease has a physical element that we’re very good at handling, but there’s always a sense of the violation. ‘Why me?’ ‘
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, ‘You must read this.’
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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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Sometimes this wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it happens later. We are all fixing what is broken.
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Empathy can be replaced by cynicism.
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We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.
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I’m a great believer in geography being destiny.
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The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE