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When you make an effort, you find sometimes you are not the only one willing to do so.
We have never faced having to rehabilitate people with such extensive wounds. We are only beginning to learn what to do to make a life worth living possible for them.
They worked together as more of a team than he’d ever experienced. “In two weeks, I went from a guy who was scared to death about whether I was going to cut it to the point where I was the most comfortable I had ever felt as a surgeon,” he says.
They did so through a commitment to making a science of performance, rather than waiting for new discoveries. And they did it under extraordinarily demanding conditions and with heroic personal sacrifices.
IT IS UNSETTLING to find how little it takes to defeat success in medicine.
In this work against sickness, we begin not with genetic or cellular interactions, but with human ones.
Providing medical care is difficult. It involves the possibility of any of a thousand missteps, and no doctor will escape making some terrible ones.
THE PARADOX AT the heart of medical care is that it works so well, and yet never well enough.
American vaccines now carry a seventy-five-cent surcharge (about 15 percent of total costs), which goes into a fund for children who are injured by them.
The easy thing for any doctor or nurse is simply to follow the written rules. But each of us has a duty not to follow rules and laws blindly.
When someone has come to you for your expertise and your expertise has failed, what do you have left? You have only your character to fall back upon—and
“Do what is right and do it now,” she used to say.
When the protocols of his profession changed, he changed with them.
You don’t want to be the cowboy who goes in to do something that your residents are not going to be able to do,”
She stared at him. “Today?” “Yes, today.” “How about tomorrow?” “We’ve failed, Janelle,” he said. “It’s important to acknowledge when we’ve failed.”
The hardest question for anyone who takes responsibility for what he or she does is, What if I turn out to be average?
