In the end, all you can do is hope for the best and trust you're making the right call.
There comes a point when the novelty wears off and monotony sets in.
You go to work, you perform the same procedures over and over, you get home late, eat leftovers straight out of the fridge, go to sleep.
Then you wake up and do it all over again.
The second you get lulled into the routine, that's when it happens.
That's when you
changed your life.
helped you see the kind of person you wanna be.
In 1952, Dr. F. John Lewis performed the first successful open-heart surgery using hypothermia.
By inducing a hypothermic state, the surgical team created a window of several minutes to close a hole in the heart of a five-year-old girl. That one surgery changed the entire course of human history. But as they watched her tiny heart, desperate for it to beat again, it could have gone either way. All they could do was hope.
When you encounter a new beginning, there's no announcement on a loudspeaker.
Blink and you could miss it.
Or worse, ignore it.
New beginnings can be scary.
But they can also be deeply fulfilling.
So let go, and dive in.
For most of history, doctors had no way to stop pain.
During surgery, patients felt every cut and stitch until they inevitably passed out. All a surgeon could do to minimize pain was work faster.
That all changed when the first surgery was performed using ether as anaesthetic.
Now surgeons faced a new dilemma. If a patient can't feel pain, when do you stop?
Anything can be a race against the clock if you let it.
Waiting for a promotion, having a child, eating the last yogurt in your refrigerator.
Sometimes, you really are running out of time.
Most of the time, it's all in your head.
And when you let go of all that fear, the possibilities are infinite.
In 1967, an orthopedic surgeon crashed his plane in the middle of nowhere with his family on board. He was shocked by how unprepared the local doctors were to treat his injured family. They prioritized what they could see: lacerations, open fractures; and didn't look for hidden injuries like brain trauma or internal bleeding.
It inspired him to invent the Advanced Trauma Life Support program.
The ATLS is only the beginning. What happens after that, is all on you.
To be good at assessing traumas, you have to be good at dissociating. You're not looking at a person on the table. You're looking at a protocol.
Sometimes the hardest part of working a trauma is finding yourself on the other side. Letting yourself feel.
Mourn the lives you've lost and celebrate the lives you've saved.
Even if it's only your own.
When a patient consents to surgery, they're not just trusting their lives to a surgeon. They're trusting an entire team.
An anesthesiologist must continually monitor sedation, respiratory and heart rate, blood pressure. A first assist suctions and retracts, helping with every suture and staple. A scrub tech organizes and hands over surgical tools, saving valuable seconds and blood spilled. And circulating nurses document the case, keeping track of who touches the patient, what's used and when.
Every member of the team shares responsibility in the patient's survival. If someone's not there, you're in trouble.
When something's been in your life for a long time, you can often forget it's there.
Whether it's a person or a place, sometimes you can take it for granted. You never consider you won't walk in that door again or hear that voice.
But yet it happens every day. People experience unexpected loss.
And as impossible as it may seem, don't give up.
You have to believe you'll find hope again.
What transforms this world is — knowledge.
Nothing else can change anything in this world.
Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is.
When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable
and at the same time are constantly being transformed.
No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.
The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness.
If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.
I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God.
I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction.
The Christian god may exist;
so may the gods of Olympus,
or of ancient Egypt,
or of Babylon.
But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other:
they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge,
and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.
The waiting can kill you.
You make a decision and then the world has to turn. The consequences unfold, out of your hands.
There's only one thing that seems clear in those quiet moments while you wait: whatever you choose, was wrong.
We just wanna survive the storm. We pray, please God, just get me to the other side.
We never imagine what it will be like when we get there.
What if, when the storm passes, nothing's left?
I always said I could handle anything. I was wrong. I was wrong about a lot of things.
But I was right about one thing
: I was right about this.
November
The Centaur, Sagittarius, am I,
Born of Ixion's and the cloud's embrace;
With sounding hoofs across the earth I fly,
A steed Thessalian with a human face.
Sharp winds the arrows are with which I chase
The leaves, half dead already with affright;
I shroud myself in gloom; and to the race
Of mortals bring nor comfort nor delight.
“November is chill, frosted mornings with a silver sun rising behind the trees, red cardinals at the feeders, and squirrels running scallops along the tops of the gray stone walls.”
“In November you begin to know how long the winter will be.”
“Peering from some high window, at the gold of November sunset and feeling that if day has to become night, this is a beautiful way.”
“The thinnest yellow light of November is more warming and exhilarating than any wine they tell of. The mite which November contributes becomes equal in value to the bounty of July.”
November. The noons are more laconic and the sunsets sterner
November always seems to be the Norway of the year.
“Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils.”
“We mourn the blossoms of May because they are to whither;
but we know that May is one day to have its revenge upon November, by the revolution of that solemn circle which never stops
— which teaches us in our height of hope, ever to be sober, and in our depth of desolation, never to despair.”
“November is auspicious in so many parts of the country: the rice harvest is already in, the weather starts to cool, and the festive glow which precedes Christmas has began to brighten the landscape.”
“This is the month of nuts and nutty thoughts — that November whose name sounds so bleak and cheerless — perhaps its harvest of thought is worth more than all the other crops of the year.”
