Aaron

“You might expect that seeing so much pain and suffering might help you keep your own difficulties in perspective but, alas, it does not.”
― Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery

“The idea that my sucker is moving through thought itself, through emotion and reason, that memories, dreams and reflections should consist of jelly, is simply too strange to understand.”
― Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery

“The operating is the easy part, you know,’ he said. ‘By my age you realize that the difficulties are all to do with the decision-making.”
― Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery

“Healthy people, I have concluded, including myself, do not understand how everything changes once you have been diagnosed with a fatal illness. How you cling to hope, however false, however slight, and how reluctant most doctors are to deprive patients of that fragile beam of light in so much darkness. Indeed, many people develop what psychiatrists call ‘dissociation’ and a doctor can find himself talking to two people – they know that they are dying and yet still hope that they will live. I had noticed the same phenomenon with my mother during the last few days of her life. When faced by people who are dying you are no longer dealing with the rational consumers assumed by economic model-builders, if they ever existed in the first place.”
― Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery - as seen on 'life-changing' BBC documentary Confessions of a Brain Surgeon