Kelly

“But as your horizons contract—when you see the future ahead of you as finite and uncertain—your focus shifts to the here and now, to everyday pleasures and the people closest to you.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End

“Courage is strength in the face of knowledge of what is to be feared or hoped. Wisdom is prudent strength.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“The problem with medicine and the institutions it has spawned for the care of the sick and the old is not that they have had an incorrect view of what makes life significant. The problem is that they have had almost no view at all. Medicine’s focus is narrow. Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul. Yet—and this is the painful paradox—we have decided that they should be the ones who largely define how we live in our waning days.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End