Reb

“Look up at the stars, and we are bombarded by light generated on the day the last victim at Pingfang died, the day the last train arrived at Auschwitz, the day the last Cherokee walked out of Georgia. And we know that the inhabitants of those distant worlds, if they are watching, will see those moments, in time, as they stream from here to there at the speed of light. It is not possible to capture all of those photons, to erase all of those images. They are our permanent record, the testimony of our existence, the story that we tell the future. Every moment, as we walk on this earth, we are watched and judged by the eyes of the universe.”
― Ken Liu

“Who will I be when I have fewer patients? When I have no patients at all? It's often noted that "practice" as it relates to medicine has two meanings: the act of caring for patients and the doctor's never-ending process of perfecting his or her craft. But there's a third meaning, too, one I'm only now appreciating as I contemplate the end of my career. Medicine is a practice in the way that yoga or meditation is for many people, an activity repeated so often that it becomes a kind of incantation. I have, for so long, stood to my patients' right sides as physicians have done for centuries, palpated the lymph nodes in their necks, armpits, and groins; auscultated their hearts and lungs; asked the same questions I first learned to ask nearly forty years ago—What makes the pain better? What makes it worse? These rituals are for me an anchor without which I fear I might simply drift away. Of course I suspected all along that what I feared wasn't abandoning my patients, but myself.”
― Suzanne Koven, Letter to a Young Female Physician: Notes from a Medical Life

“If history were itself a book, this era would surely be the last chapter, wouldn't it? Or have all ages believed this? That life can't possible go on and that these are the end times? At the height of the Great Depression, Euphemia wrote about a society that couldn't possibly continue. Still, things did go on. And on. And on. Years piling on years. Layers upon layers. Light and dark. Sapwood over heartwood.”
― Michael Christie, Greenwood

“It’s a moment every clinician has inhabited and, all too often, pulled back from—a threshold we fear crossing. We imagine ourselves, [...], and recognize a double bind, a new doctor’s dilemma: if we ask about [a patient's interest/personal information], we fall hopelessly behind in administrative tasks and feel more burned out. If we don’t ask about [it], we avoid the kind of intimacy that not only helps the patient, but also nourishes us and keeps us from feeling burned out.”
― Suzanne Koven, Letter to a Young Female Physician: Notes from a Medical Life