Jen Riedel

“In the first year, I would glimpse my share of death. I sometimes saw it while peeking around corners, other times while feeling embarrassed to be caught in the same room. Here were a few of the people I saw die:

1. An alcoholic, his blood no longer able to clot, who bled to death into his joints and under his skin. Before he became delirious, he looked up at me and said "It's not fair - I've been diluting my drinks with water."

2. A pathologist, dying of pneumonia, wheezing her death rattle before heading down to be autopsied - her final trip to the pathology lab.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“All of medicine, not just cadaver dissection, trespasses into sacred spheres. Doctors invade the body in every way imaginable. They see people at their most vulnerable, their most sacred, their most private. They escort them into the world and then back out.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“A truculent vet refused the advice of doctors, nurses and physical therapists for weeks; as a result, his back wound broke down, just as we had warned him it would. Called out of the OR, I stitched the dehiscent wound as he yelped in pain, telling myself he'd had it coming.

Nobody has it coming.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“In anatomy lab, we objectified the dead, literally reducing them to organs, tissues, nerves, muscles. On that first day, you simply could not deny the humanity of the corpse. But by the time you'd skinned the limbs, sliced through inconvenient muscles, pulled out the lungs, cut open the heart and removed a lobe of the liver, it was hard to recognize this pile of tissue as human. Anatomy lab, in the end, becomes less a violation of the sacred and more something that interferes with happy hour, and that realization discomfits. In our rare reflective moments, we were all silently apologizing to our cadavers, not because we sensed the transgression but because we did not.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air