Quote

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 Verghese

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Abraham Verghese
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 1
Physician
University Teacher
Writer
Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia
Feelings
Emergencies
Life
Stake
Stakes
Familiar
Medicine
Understood
Falseness
Feeling
Calmness
Felt
Emergency

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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.
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My VIP patients often regret so many things on their deathbeds. They regret the bitterness they'll leave in people's hearts. They realize the no money, no church service, no eulogy, no funeral procession no matter how elaborate, can remove the legacy of a mean spirit.
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Geography is destiny.
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The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.
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In an emergency, what treatment is given by ear? Words of Comfort.
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He was teaching me how to die, just as he'd taught me how to live.
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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. Now, as to the problem of how much health care costs and how we reform health care ... it is another story altogether.
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Don't Let Him Know is a rich, evocative and brilliantly told tale of family, of loyalties, and of love that must stay secret. Sandip Roy has broken new ground in this tale of the modern Indian family. A lovely read
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We'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.
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We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.
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You are an instrument of God. Don't leave the instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. Why settle for 'Three Blind Mice' when you can can play the 'Gloria'? No, not Bach's 'Gloria.' Yours! Your 'Gloria' lives within you. The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made possible in you.
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I 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.
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I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient is not by staring at the computer screen but by going to see the patient it's only at the bedside that I can figure out what is important.
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We have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients. And then by the end of the third year they completely lose that ability, partly because we teach them the specialized language of medicine.
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Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion.
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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.
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What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?
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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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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. If we are fortunate, we 'beat' the cancer. If not, we are posthumously praised for having 'succumbed after a long battle.'
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I always wondered if the good people who send us bibles really think that hookworm and hunger are healed by scripture? Our patients are illiterate.
Abraham Verghese