Quotes by Neurosurgeons

The evening was a string of miserable minutes strung together in tiny clusters. Three minutes for a man shot through the shoulder; Ellis put first a finger in the entry wound and then another in the exit and when his fingers touched, he decided the man was only lightly injured and didn’t need a surgeon. Three minutes to set a broken wrist and splint it with a strip of cowhide and a piece of wood from a sycamore tree. Two minutes to tourniquet a leg, then extract a piece of wire deep in the meat of it. A minute to peek under a pink, saturated bandage several inches below a slender belly button; he saw thin, red water leaking from a hole and smelled urine, knew the ball had breached the bladder. It would either heal or it wouldn’t, but nothing to do about it so he set the soul aside, a case not to be operated upon. He turned a man’s head looking for the source of a trickle of blood and had ten terrible minutes trying to stop torrential bleeding from under his clavicle; frantic moments during which he could get neither a finger nor a clamp around the pulsating source. All bleeding stops eventually though, and the case did not violate the rule. He took two minutes to settle his own breathing, then four minutes sewing a torn scalp, and half a minute saying a prayer over a fat, cigar-shaped dead man. After awhile, he had the impression he wasn’t seeing men, but parts—an exploded chest, a blood swolled thigh, a busted jaw with its teeth spat to the wind or swallowed.It was more than a man could take and a lot less than there was to be seen.
Edison McDaniels
The wheel of life: one generation rises like summer wheat, then withers and falls to seed. The wheel turns - birth, youth, adulthood, parenthood, senescence, death - driven by genetic machinery set in motion so many eons ago. For all its subtleties and infinite beauty, life has but one purpose: to keep the wheel turning.
Frank Vertosick Jr.
When push comes to shove we can afford to lose an arm or a leg, but I am operating on peoples thoughts and feelings... and if something goes wrong I can destroy that persons character... forever.
Henry Marsh
Words began to feel as weightless as the breath that carried. Stepping back, I realized that I was merely confirming what I already knew: I wanted that direct experience. It was only in practicing medicine that I could pursue a serious biological philosophy. Moral speculation was puny compared to moral action.
Paul Kalanithi
Our culture is obsessed with youth because we have lost the ancient knowledge that growth never stops. We are not transient, momentary mistakes inthe cosmos- evolutionary curiosities that rise like mayflies, swarm for a day, and are gone. We are players who are here to stay, and the universe was built with us in mind. We reflect it, with our deepest loves and loftiest aspirations, just as it reflects us.
Eben Alexander M.D.
Hundreds of men crowded the yard, and not a one among them was whole. They covered the ground thick as maggots on a week old carcass, the dirt itself hardly anywhere visible. No one could move without all feeling it and thus rising together in a hellish contortion of agony. Everywhere men moaned, shouting for water and praying for God to end their suffering. They screamed and groaned in an unending litany, calling for mothers and wives and fathers and sisters. The predominant color was blue, though nauseations of red intruded throughout. Men lay half naked, piled on top of one another in scenes to pitiful to imagine. Bloodied heads rested on shoulders and laps, broken feet upon arms. Tired hands held in torn guts and torsos twisted every which way. Dirty shirts dressed the bleeding bodies and not enough material existed in all the world to sop up the spilled blood. A boy clad in gray, perhaps the only rebel among them, lay quietly in one corner, raised arm rigid with a finger extended, as if pointing to the heavens. His face was a singular portrait of contentment among the misery. Broken bones, dirty white and soiled with the passing of hours since injury, were everywhere abundant. All manner of devices splinted the damaged and battered limbs: muskets, branches, bayonets, lengths of wood or iron from barns and carts. One individual had bone splinted with bone: the dried femur of a horse was lashed to his busted shin. A blind man, his eyes subtracted by the minié ball that had enfiladed him, moaned over and over “I’m kilt, I’m kilt! Oh Gawd, I’m kilt!” Others lay limp, in shock. These last were mostly quiet, their color unnaturally pale. It was agonizingly humid in the still air of the yard. The stink of blood mixed with human waste produced a potent and offensive odor not unlike that of a hog farm in the high heat of a South Carolina summer. Swarms of fat, green blowflies everywhere harassed the soldiers to the point of insanity, biting at their wounds. Their steady buzz was a noise straight out of hell itself, a distress to the ears.
Edison McDaniels
It's not what you know but the kind of job you do that makes the difference.
Ben Carson
There is a tension in the Bible between justice and mercy, between the Old Testament and the New Testament. And the New Testament says you can never be good enough: goodness is the thing, and you can never live up to it. The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.
Paul Kalanithi
Time for me is now double-edged: every day brings me further from the low of my last relapse but closer to the next recurrence - and, eventually, death. Perhaps later than I think, but certainly sooner than I desire.
Paul Kalanithi
I finally chalked it up to the fact that the brain is truly an extraordinary device: more extraordinary than we can even guess.
Eben Alexander
No matter how good you are at planning, the pressure never goes away. So I don't fight it. I feed off it. I turn pressure into motivation to do my best.
Benjamin Carson
If you want to be relevant only in your household, then you only need to know the things that are important in your house, and if you want to be relevant in your neighborhood, you need to know what's important in your neighborhood. The same thing applies to your city, state, and country. And if you want to be relevant to the entire world, program that computer known as your brain with all kinds of information from everywhere in order to prepare yourself.
Ben Carson
Laughter and irony are at heart reminders that we are not prisoners in this world, but voyagers through it.
Eben Alexander
Don't you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?""Wouldn't it be great if it did?" I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn't about avoiding suffering.
Paul Kalanithi
Dying in one’s fourth decade is unusual now, but dying is not. “The thing about lung cancer is that it’s not exotic,” Paul wrote in an email to his best friend, Robin. “The reader can get into these shoes, walk a bit, and say, ‘So that’s what it looks like from here. Sooner or later, I’ll be back here in my own shoes.’ That’s what I’m aiming for, I think. Not the sensationalism of dying and not the exhortations to gather rosebuds but: Here’s what lies up ahead on the road.” Of course, he did more than just describe the terrain. He traversed it bravely.
Paul Kalanithi
I had seen that once before, bleeding water. A little baby I worked on as a resident in training. That poor kid had been shot as well—his father had blasted away the top of his head with a shotgun—and we couldn't begin to stop the bloodletting in that case. "Looking pretty thin down here," I hollered when the stuff coming out his wounds was no more than pink salt water. That baby's heart stopped, started, stopped and started a dozen times before it finally gave up the ghost and we pronounced him. I could have read a newspaper through the watery stuff coming out his veins by then.
Edison McDaniels
Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter.
J. Nozipo Maraire
If we are to put an end to division, people from all political persuasions will have to stop fighting one another and seek true unity, not just a consensus that benefits one party.
Ben Carson
Freedom is not reserved for those unwilling to fight for it.
Ben Carson
If Americans simply choose to vote for the person who has a D or an R by their name, we will get what we deserve, which is what we have now.
Ben Carson
A story-a true story-can heal as much as medicine can.
Eben Alexander
My experience showed me that the death of the body and the brain are not the end of consciousness, that human experience continues beyond the grave. More important, it continues under the gaze of a God who loves and cares about each one of us and about where the Universe itself and all the beings withing it are ultimately goind.
Eben Alexander
If you're good, you'll be recognized. Because people, even if they're prejudiced, are going to want the best. You just have to make being the best your goal in life.
Ben Carson
What patients seek is not scientific knowledge that doctors hide but existential authenticity each person must find on her own. Getting too deeply into statistics is like trying to quench a thirst with salty water. The angst of facing mortality has no remedy in probability.
Paul Kalanithi
Everything teeters between pathos and bathos: here you are, violating society's most fundamental taboos and yet formaldehyde is a powerful appetite stimulant, so you also crave a burrito.
Paul Kalanithi
Adult obesity and overweight statistics have increased by about 50 percent since the Dietary Goals were announced. [by the federal government, in 1977] That bears repeating: a 50 percent increase in obesity/overweight correlated with a 10 percent decrease in fat content in the diet.
Larry McCleary
The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time. Not only that, but maybe the basic message of original sin isn't "feel guilty all the time." Maybe it is more along these lines: "We all have a notion of what it means to be good, and we can't live up to it all the time.
Paul Kalanithi
One way to develop courage is to consider what will happen if we fail to act.
Ben Carson
When the vision of the U.S. government included guarding the rights of people but staying out of their way, America was an economic engine more powerful than anything the world had ever witnessed.
Ben Carson
America's leaders should be examples of integrity and high moral standards. When their behavior evokes shame rather than pride and becomes something that we don't want to discuss in front of the children at the kitchen table, we should consider impeachment.
Ben Carson
I hope we can continue to find ways to encourage integrity in all aspects of government operations
Ben Carson
It's not what you do but that kind of job you do that makes the difference.
Ben Carson
Our eternal spiritual self is more real than anything we perceive in this physical realm, and has a divine connection to the infinite love of the Creator.
Eben Alexander
Before operating on a patient's brain, I realized, I must first understand his mind: his identity, his values, what makes his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end. The cost of my dedication to succeed was high, and the ineluctable failures brought me nearly unbearable guilt. Those burdens are what make medicine holy and wholly impossible: in taking up another's cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight.
Paul Kalanithi
Sometimes I struggled to say something meaningful only to learn that silence is just as powerful as words.
Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa
About eighty percent of the food on shelves of supermarkets today didn't exist 100 years ago.
Larry McCleary
Great things were going to happen in my life, and I had to do my part by preparing myself and being ready.
Ben Carson
The human brain has billions of neurons and hundreds of billions of interconnections. It can process more than two million bits of information per second and can remember everything you have ever seen or heard.
Ben Carson
Anatomy lab, in the end, becomes less a violation of the sacred and more something that interferes with happy hour, and that realization discomfits. In our rare reflective moments, we were all silently apologizing to our cadavers, not because we sensed the transgression but because we did not.
Paul Kalanithi
mind was simply the operation of the brain, an idea that struck me with force; it startled my naive understanding of the world
Paul Kalanithi
I came to realize that if people could make me angry they could could control me. Why should I give someone else such power over my life?
Ben Carson
When I was young, I thought classical music was only the background noise for cartoons.
Ben Carson
As a resident, my highest ideal was not saving lives -- everyone dies eventually -- but guiding a patient or family to an understanding of death or illness.
Paul Kalanithi
The pain of failure had led me to understand that technical excellence was a moral requirement.
Paul Kalanithi
Will having a newborn distract from the time we have together?' she asked. 'Don't you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more pain¬ful?''Wouldn't it be great if it did?' I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn't about avoiding suffering. Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteris¬tic of the organism is striving. Describing life otherwise was like painting a tiger without stripes. After so many years of living with death, I'd come to understand that the easiest death wasn't necessarily the best. We talked it over. Our families gave their blessing. We decided to have a child. We would carry on living, instead of dying.
Paul Kalanithi
[H]e found poetry more comforting than Scripture—and his ability to forge from his life a cogent, powerful tale of living with death.
Paul Kalanithi
Often I return to the grave after leaving flowers – tulips, lilies, carnations – to find the heads eaten by deer. It’s just as good a use for the flowers as any, and one Paul would have liked. The earth is quickly turned over by worms, the processes of nature marching on, reminding me of what Paul saw and what I now carry deep in my bones, too: the inextricability of life and death, and the ability to cope, to find meaning despite this, because of this. What happened to Paul was tragic, but he was not a tragedy.
Paul Kalanithi
People often ask if it was calling. My answer always is yes.
Paul Kalanithi
Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job-- not a calling.
Paul Kalanithi
Compassion, however, should mean providing a mechanism to escape poverty rather than simply maintaining people in an impoverished state by supplying handouts. By doing this we give them an opportunity to elevate their personal situations, which eventually decreases our need to take care of them and empowers them to be able to exercise compassion toward others.
Ben Carson
When someone is being particularly mean and nasty, I simply think to myself, he or she used to be a cute little baby, I wonder what happened?
Ben Carson
Compassion and kindness it turned out, was good for your health.
James R. Doty
After I was caught returning at dawn from one such late-night escapade, my worried mother thoroughly interrogated me regarding every drug teenagers take, never suspecting that the most intoxicating thing I’d experienced, by far, was the volume of romantic poetry she’d handed me the previous week. Books became my closest confidants, finely ground lenses providing new views of the world.
Paul Kalanithi
Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job- not a calling.
Paul Kalanithi
A word meant something only between people, and life’s meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form.
Paul Kalanithi
By reading so much, my vocabulary automatically improved along with my comprehension.
Ben Carson
I was searching for a vocabulary with which to make sense of death, to find a way to begin defining myself and inching forward again. The privilege of direct experience had led me away from literary and academic work, yet now I felt that to understand my own experiences, I would have to translate them back into language. Hemingway described his process in similar terms: acquiring rich experiences, then retreating to cogitate and write about them. I needed words to go forward.
Paul Kalanithi
Literature not only illuminated another's experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection
Paul Kalanithi
A large piece of lead floated out of Bobby head, followed by dark chunks of what could only be pieces of Bobby's brain.The torrent started up again. It flowed steady rather than pulsed with his heart. I knew from that, and from the amount of blood, that it was that mofo vein bleeding. And probably more than a small tear if the amount of blood was telling. I thought there had to be a hole the size of Montana in that thing."Jesus Mother Mary" I said, then "Stitch!"The scrub tech slapped a needle holder into my palm, a curved needle and silk stitch clamped into the end of it. I might have closed my eyes—I've been told I do that sometimes in surgery when I'm trying to visualize something—though if so I don't remember doing it. I took that needle and aimed it into the pool of blood."Suck here Joe, right here."When I thought I could see something, something gray and not black red, I plunged the pointy end of the needle through whatever the visible tissue was and looped it out again. I cinched it down and tied it quick, then repeated the maneuver again after adjusting slightly for lighting, sweating, my own bounding heartbeat, and the regret I wasn't wearing my own diaper.We're losing, I thought.
Edison McDaniels
There are monsters among us. I mean this quite literally.
Edison McDaniels