If ‘ecstasy’ meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEIf ‘ecstasy’ meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEMy intent wasn’t to save the world as much as to heal myself. Few doctors will admit this, certainly not young ones, but subconsciously, in entering the profession
ABRAHAM VERGHESEWe 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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESERituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation.
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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESELife, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEIgnorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEHe was teaching me how to die, just as he’d taught me how to live.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEWhen we cannot cure or save a life, our patients can at least feel cared for. It should be a basic human right.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEI think we learn from medicine everywhere that it is, at its heart, a human endeavor, requiring good science but also a limitless curiosity and interest in your fellow human being, and that the physician-patient relationship is key; all else follows from it.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEI joke, but I only half joke, that if you come to one of our hospitals missing a limb, no one will believe you till they get a CAT scan, MRI, or orthopedic consult.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEWhen 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 VERGHESEWe’re losing a ritual. We’re losing a ritual that I believe is transformative, transcendent, and is at the heart of the patient-physician relationship.
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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEPray tell us, what’s your favorite number?”… “Shiva jumped up to the board, uninvited, and wrote 10,213,223″… “
ABRAHAM VERGHESEStill, it’s an apt metaphor for our profession. But there’s another kind of hole, and that is the wound that divides family.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE