I have sat with countless patients and families to discuss grim prognoses: It's one of the most important jobs physicians have. It's easier when the patient is 94, in the last stages of dementia, and has a severe brain bleed. For young people like me - I am 36 - given a diagnosis of cancer, there aren't many words.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the emotional burden of discussing terminal diagnoses with patients and families, especially when the patient is young.
In this quote, Paul Kalanithi, a physician who faced his own diagnosis of cancer at a young age, expresses the profound challenge and responsibility that doctors have when it comes to conveying grim news. He acknowledges that while it may be somewhat easier to discuss such matters with elderly patients who are already in the later stages of life, doing so with younger individuals presents a unique set of challenges, as it evokes feelings of hopelessness and tragedy when confronting the reality of a life cut short.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of compassion in medicine, this quote can highlight the emotional aspect of patient care.
Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable.
Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.
Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job - not a calling.
The root of disaster means a star coming apart, and no image expresses better the look in a patient's eyes when hearing a neurosurgeon's diagnosis.
Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present.
When there's no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon's only tool.
I'd sleep and forget it; I had my own life, my own sad and ragged life forever.
Her grief was so big and wild it terrified her, like an evil beast that had erupted from under the floorboards.
Don't be on your deathbed someday, having squandered your one chance at life, full of regret because you pursued little distractions instead of big dreams.
Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night, Brother to Death, in silent darkness born, Relieve my languish and restore the light; With dark forgetting of my care return. And let the day be time enough to mourn The shipwreck of my ill adventured youth: Let waking eyes suffice to wail their scorn Without the torment of the night's untruth.
If you want the beautiful moments to shine, you have to contrast that with dark and gruesome moments. That's the way life is.
The part of life which we really live is short.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.