“You don’t cure depression, the same way you don’t cure asthma; you manage it. I’m the inhaler he’s decided to go with and I should be pleased he’s gone this long without an attack.”
― This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor
― This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor
“I expected to feel only empty and heartbroken after Paul died. It never occurred to me that you could love someone the same way after he was gone, that I would continue to feel such love and gratitude alongside the terrible sorrow, the grief so heavy that at times I shiver and moan under the weight of it.”
― When Breath Becomes Air
― When Breath Becomes Air
“a great doctor must have a huge heart and a distended aorta through which pumps a vast lake of compassion and human kindness.”
― This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor
― This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor
“What happened to Paul was tragic, but he was not a tragedy.”
― When Breath Becomes Air
― When Breath Becomes Air
“Death comes for all of us. For us, for our patients: it is our fate as living, breathing, metabolizing organisms. Most lives are lived with passivity toward death -- it's something that happens to you and those around you. But Jeff and I had trained for years to actively engage with death, to grapple with it, like Jacob with the angel, and, in so doing, to confront the meaning of a life. We had assumed an onerous yoke, that of mortal responsibility. Our patients' lives and identities may be in our hands, yet death always wins. Even if you are perfect, the world isn't. The secret is to know that the deck is stacked, that you will lose, that your hands or judgment will slip, and yet still struggle to win for your patients. You can't ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”
― When Breath Becomes Air
― When Breath Becomes Air
Liz’s 2024 Year in Books
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