Lynda E

“Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding?”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“THIS IS NOT, to say the least, an appealing prospect. People naturally prefer to avoid the subject of their decrepitude. There have been dozens of bestselling books on aging, but they tend to have titles such as Younger Next Year, The Fountain of Age, Ageless, or—my favorite—The Sexy Years. Still, there are costs to averting our eyes from the realities. We put off dealing with the adaptations that we need to make as a society. And we blind ourselves to the opportunities that exist to change the individual experience of aging for the better.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“Nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“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