Atul Gawande writes as if he's telling a story. He shares his historical anecdotes and personal experiences about how people cope with growing old and/or reaching the terminal stages of one's illness and life. He notes his own thoughts while he and other healthcare workers, including hospice phys...
was recommended to me by a coworker. Great, fast read. For a book about lists, it held my attention and supplied some good illustrative anecdotes.
Read these sentences and tell me that this writer isn't an unbearable idiot:"If choice [of one's surgeon] cannot go to everyone, maybe it is better when it is not allowed at all.""Taking time to bond with patients is fine, but every X ray must be tracked down and every drug dose must be exactly r...
I have had a lot of doctors in my life. The best one I ever had was the surgeon who failed. Before I went under, he told me it would take about 2 hours and had an 85% success rate. When I woke up, nearly five hours had passed, I was in far more pain than I had been led to expect, and he was waiti...
My parents, both doctors, were fit and healthy. They were immigrants from India, raising me and my sister in the small college town of Athens, Ohio, so my grandparents were far away. The one elderly person I regularly encountered was a woman down the street who gave me piano lessons when I was in...
They are separated by a dark blanketlike screen hung between them. Behind it, the woman is covered from head to foot by her burka. The two do not talk directly to each other. The patient's young son--he looks to be about six years old--serves as the go-between. She has a stomachache, he says. "Do...
“Here’s your chance,” S., the chief resident, said. I had never done one before. “Get set up and then page me when you’re ready to start.” It was my fourth week in surgical training. The pockets of my short white coat bulged with patient printouts, laminated ca...
THE TEST Back in Boston, I set my research team to work making our fledgling surgery checklist more usable. We tried to follow the lessons from aviation. We made it clearer. We made it speedier. We adopted mainly a DO-CONFIRM rather than a READ-DO format, to give people greater flexibility in ...