When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales of Neurosurgery

Failure instructs better than success. A single death shapes the surgeon’s psyche in a way that fifty “saves” cannot.

facts matter a great deal. What a patient does for a living, what his background is, what level of education he has achieved…all of these issues must be addressed in great detail in order to put his complaints and his disease in the proper context. If I ask a man to take the square root of 100 and he cannot, I might take this as proof of a left-hemispheric brain tumor, unless I know that he has worked on a farm since childhood and never attended school. Likewise, I might find it normal that a patient could not tell me the current exchange rate of the pound in Japanese yen. But if I knew that person was a merchant banker, on the other hand, ignorance of this fact would indicate a grave illness indeed! Americans have grown so dependent upon their scanning toys that they fail to view the patient as a multidimensional person. To have the audacity to cut into a person’s brain without the slightest clue of his life, his occupation…I find that most simply appalling.” These

just remember the rules of any surgical residency: Never stand when you can be sitting, never sit when you can be lying down, never use the stairs when there are elevators, never be awake if you can be asleep, and always eat and shit at the first available opportunity.

The person who dies with the least scars wins.

My fatigue was growing, but i could not show weakness. If it was easy, anybody could do it.

disease affects the insulating fat, or myelin, around nerve

There is a profound difference between pain and suffering. All animals feel pain. Only humans suffer.

Is the brain a gift from God, or simply the jackpot of a trillion rolls of DNA dice?

A Native American proverb states that a child allowed to wander into the campfire learns better than a child told a thousand times to stay away.