Ameera JR

“The world was bigger, stranger, richer, and wilder than I had a right to ask for.”
― Richard Powers, Playground

“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

“I wish I could have told him that loneliness is a human invention. Trees are never lonely. Humans think they know with certainty where their being ends and someone else's starts. With their roots tangled and caught up underground, linked to fungi and bacteria, trees harbour no such illusions. For us, everything is interconnected.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“As time has passed, I’ve found it to be generally true in life that, in the end, things are usually okay. Sometimes it just takes a lot of hard work and uncertainty to get there.”
― Hadley Vlahos, The In-Between: Unforgettable Encounters During Life's Final Moments