Atul Gawande Quotes

I blacked out in a Rite Aid. The doctor told me my heart function was at 5 percent. I spent two months in the hospital waiting to have a transplant. For me, that was the end of the world.

My heart stopped twice. They had to stab me to drain the blood from my lungs because I was drowning in my own blood.

The patient is in intensive care but still alive.

When my little son, Prince, had health issues as a baby, we were told that he had a 20 percent chance of survival.

I was only 13 years old when I was forced to face the fragility of my own life. A routine surgery landed me in a medically induced coma for two weeks with a mere 1% chance of surviving. But survive I did.

I was 19 years old, and I felt like I had the flu one day. Within 24 hours, I was in the hospital on life support, and I was given less than a 2 percent chance of living. It took five days for the doctors to find out that I had contracted bacterial meningitis.

You might say it was my return to the living that launched me as a singer. I was placed in an oxygen tent, and the doctors brought me back to life.

For something to collapse, not all systems have to shut down. In most cases, just one system is enough. For example, the human body is a system of systems. If just one system, such as the cardiovascular system, shuts down, death follows.

When you're dealing with a very sick person and you're doing something to them, an intervention, be it a procedure or a medication, safety is critical.

The brain is probably the most mysterious subject there is.

There are a hell of a lot of jobs that are scarier than live comedy. Like standing in the operating room when a guy's heart stops, and you're the one who has to fix it!

Neurobiological research has shown that in people with chronic PTSD, both stress hormone secretion and areas of the brain connected to memory function, such as the hippocampus, appear to be affected, although exactly how and why remains controversial.

The battle against cancer has made me strong. It's like winning a war! When I was diagnosed, I was told by doctors my kidney, liver and other organs could fail. It was tough. I didn't know if I could save my life. But I was positive, and because of that, the doctor told me that I would be a man who would never have cancer.

I realized not long ago that by the time I leave this Earth, no matter when it is I will have officially only spent approximately 14 years of my life where I did not have to deal with cancer.

You only worry about your head or spinal column. Everything else, some way or another, will repair in time.

Time is shortening. But every day that I challenge this cancer and survive is a victory for me.

Sometime they don't let you know that they know that they don't know everything, but the core of the medical approach is that you try to identify pathologies, which are subsystems within the human body or the larger system that are having undesirable consequences.

I was so unhealthy as a child, and at least three or four times my parents were told to get ready, that I would not make it.

Diagnosis is not the end, but the beginning of practice.

My specialties are corpses, unconscious people and people snoring in spectacular epics.

There are things that you can do today that, years ago, there was nothing. The community today needs to know that with MRI and the current medications the view is good.

If we can make the correct diagnosis, the healing can begin. If we can't, both our personal health and our economy are doomed.

As the mother of a grown son with a traumatic brain injury, I couldn't be more excited about the prospect of finding out how to repair even a small part of the damage that changed his life.

A long iron rod rocketed straight through the very forefront of Phineas Gage's brain. It's kind of an unusual part of the brain: you can suffer pretty severe injuries to it and often walk away from the injury. It's not a part of the brain that's necessarily vital for your biological self. But it is very important for personality.

Men, women, and children, who would be doomed to death in the savage state, have their lives prolonged by civilization; the sickly, whom the hardships of the savage struggle for existence would kill off, are carefully tended in hospitals, and saved by medical skill; the parents, whose thread of life would be cut short, are cherished on into prolonged old age; the feeble, who would be left to starve, are tenderly shielded from hardship, and life’s road is made the smoother for the lame; the average life is lengthened, and more and more thought is brought to bear on the causes of preventable disease; better drainage, better homes, better food, better clothing, all these, among the more comfortable classes, remove many of the natural checks to population.