I think America is really in denial about the degree to which residents, particularly foreign medical graduates, man the county hospitals of this country, and but for their services, I'm not sure how exactly we could manage.
She died chasing greatness and never saw it each time it was in her hand, so she kept seeking it elsewhere, but never understood the work required to get it or to keep it.
What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it. The process of learning huge volumes of information about disease, of learning a specialised language, can ironically make one lose sight of the patient one came to serve; empathy can be replaced by cynicism.
Pray tell us, what's your favorite number?"... "Shiva jumped up to the board, uninvited, and wrote 10,213,223"... "And pray, why would this number interest us?" "It is the only number that describes itself when you read it, 'One zero, two ones, three twos, two threes'.
In America, we have always taken it as an article of faith that we 'battle' cancer; we attack it with knives, we poison it with chemotherapy or we blast it with radiation. If we are fortunate, we 'beat' the cancer. If not, we are posthumously praised for having 'succumbed after a long battle.'
Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.
I believe in black holes. I believe that as the universe empties into nothingness, past and future will smack together in the last swirl around the drain.