The Woman with a Worm in Her Head Quotes

“People don’t line up in medical school to get intimate with AIDS, parasitic worms, and flesh-eating bacteria. The natural human impulse is to pull away and protect ourselves, and to think we’re safe because we’re not in some jungle, waiting for the next Ebola outbreak. But the truth is, in the big-city HMO where I work, I often get paged twenty or thirty times a day to size up infectious diseases that come from what we eat, what we breathe, what we touch, and where we go. The rare and mysterious cases I see walk into my hospital every day.”
― Pamela Nagami, The Woman with a Worm in Her Head: & Other True Stories of Infectious Disease

“The meaning of life is life itself. Life fighting to stay alive in a cold, dark universe.”
― Pamela Nagami, The Woman with a Worm in Her Head: & Other True Stories of Infectious Disease

“that Jeremy was suffering from meningococcemia. I was haunted by something I had read about the infection: “The capacity of the meningococcus to kill a perfectly healthy individual within a few hours remains one of the most awesome characteristics of this disease.”
― Pamela Nagami, The Woman with a Worm in Her Head: & Other True Stories of Infectious Disease

“When I put my stethoscope to a person’s chest what I’m listening for are signs of the heart’s flaws. In a normal adult heart, all you hear are the sounds of the heart valves snapping shut after the blood flows across them. The blood’s flow, as it moves across normal heart valves and around cardiac structures that are smooth and without abnormal perforations, is smooth and silent. It’s called laminar flow, the same quiet, unbroken stream you get if you turn on a faucet just a little. If the edge of a heart valve is rough with scar or calcium, the aperture is leaky or fused shut, or there is a hole in a septum of the heart, the blood will flow through with a whoosh. This is turbulent flow, and it’s also what happens across a water faucet that is clogged or opened wide. When doctors hear a murmur, they’re hearing turbulent flow across something abnormal in the heart. That”
― Pamela Nagami, The Woman with a Worm in Her Head: & Other True Stories of Infectious Disease