Neurosurgery Quotes

Neurosurgery seemed to present the most challenging and direct confrontation with meaning, identity, and death.

So Hosaka’s built a regular little neurosurgery and staffed it with three hotshots. Two of them are company men, the third’s a Korean who knows black medicine from both ends.

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

Americans love to mess about with the brain--that's why they are at the forefront of neurosurgery.

After neurosurgery, I have learned that my brain is a boardinghouse where my waking consciousness rents one room with a hot plate and a black-and-white TV while the rest of the rooms are occupied by a random assortment of banshees, ghosts, mimes wearing eagle feathers, and approximately twelve thousand strangers who look exactly like me.

People who cry at funerals shouldn’t become undertakers.

Neurosurgery is really hard work, and no one would have faulted me for not going back. (People often ask if it is a calling, and my answer is always yes. You can’t see it as a job, because if it’s a job, it’s one of the worst jobs there is.)

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.

like the ancient Greek concept arete, I thought, virtue required moral, emotional, mental, and physical excellence. Neurosurgery seemed to present the most challenging and

wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALS and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison.

Neurosurgery attracted me as much for its intertwining of brain & consciousness as for its intertwining of life & death.

It's the professional shame that hurts the most,' I said to him. I wheeled my bike as we walked along Fleet Street. 'Vanity really. As a neurosurgeon you have to come to terms with ruining people's lives and with making mistakes. But one still feels terrible about it and how much it will cost.

The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to say that a new idea is the most quickly acting antigen known to science. If we watch ourselves honestly we shall often find that we have begun to argue against a new idea even before it has been completely stated.

I had started in this career, in part, to pursue death: to grasp it, uncloak it, and see eye-to-eye, unblinking. Neurosurgery attracted me as much for its intertwining of brain and consciousness as for its intertwining of life and death. I had thought that a life spent in the space between the two would grant me not merely a stage for compassionate action but an elevation of my own being: getting as far away from petty materialism, from self- important trivia, getting right there, to the heart of the matter, to truly life and death decisions and struggles... surely a kind of transcendence would be found there?

The person who dies with the least scars wins.

Neurosurgery requires a commitment to one’s own excellence and a commitment to another’s identity.

I was compelled by neurosurgery, with its unforgiving call to perfection; like the ancient Greek concept arete, I thought, virtue required moral, emotional, mental & physical excellence.

Only the neurosurgeon dares to improve upon five billion years of evolution in a few hours. The human brain. A trillion nerve cells storing electrical patterns more numerous than the water molecules of the world’s oceans. The soul’s tapestry lies woven in the brain’s nerve threads. Delicate, inviolate, the brain floats serenely in a bone vault like the crown jewel of biology. What motivated the vast leap in intellectual horsepower between chimp and man? Between tree dweller and moon walker? Is the brain a gift from God, or simply the jackpot of a trillion rolls of DNA dice?

Grasping the handle, I turn the mug upside down to see if she’s signed it. Sure enough, there’s something etched into the unglazed bottom. I have to squint to read the tiny letters. Dear Ryan. Thank you for making Jamie so happy. He loves you and so do we. Welcome to the Canning clan. Oh boy. There’s a burn at the back of my throat, and I concentrate hard on settling the mug back into the box. I spend more time than necessary tucking the tissue paper around it with the care of someone performing neurosurgery. When I’m finally ready to look up again, Jamie’s mom is waiting for me. The warm look in her eye makes the sting in my throat even worse.

It just shows you that if you take a plain, ordinary, moronic intern and make him do the same things over and over again until he loses is mind, you can teach him to do almost anything. I think now that I've mastered IVs, I might take up neurosurgery in my spare time.

Do you know why I chose neurosurgery, sir? Because the mission we organized to perform those surgeries couldn't help the patients with neurogenic blindness. So this isn't one case- it's the reason I became a doctor." And no one was going to keep her from going into that OR.

Another part wished she’d said, “Going back to being a neurosurgeon is crazy for you—pick something easier.” I was startled to realize that in spite of everything, the last few months had had one area of lightness: not having to bear the tremendous weight of the responsibility neurosurgery demanded

My first day in the hospital, the chief resident said to me, "Neurosurgery residents aren't just the best surgeons -- we're the best doctors in the hospital. That's your goal. Make us proud." The chairman, passing through the ward: "Always eat with your left hand. You've got to learn to be ambidextrous.

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

Still, when you work in a hospital, the papers you file aren't just papers: they are fragments of narratives filled with risks & triumphs.

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

Each of my three recommendations for boosting creativity have a common thread: I am urging you to break the routine and spend more time goofing around. Sleep, dream, play, take a walk: do anything but work. And I say this to you as someone who, remember, went through years of medical school, graduate school, and neurosurgery training. I certainly understand the need for work and focus, for studying, for spending eighteen hours a day at it. But human beings are not automatons. We are called for greater things.

I was startled to realize that in spite of everything, the last few months had had one area of lightness: not having to bear the tremendous weight of the responsibility neurosurgery demanded—and part of me wanted to be excused from picking up the yoke again. Neurosurgery is really hard work, and no one would have faulted me for not going back. (People often ask if it is a calling, and my answer is always yes. You can’t see it as a job, because if it’s a job, it’s one of the worst jobs there is.) A couple of my professors actively discouraged the idea: “Shouldn’t you be spending time with your family?” (“Shouldn’t you?” I wondered. I was making the decision to do this work because this work, to me, was a sacred thing.)

Philosophy is one of those subjects, like astrophysics and neurosurgery, that are not for the fainthearted. To delve into the absolutes of the human experience, to seek to advance the progress of enlightenment first expounded by the likes of the revered Aristotle and Plato, to search for the answers to the profound questions of the universe, often at the risk of deadly reprisal from entrenched powers, requires not only brilliance and tenacity but a deep sense of purpose. But even among this select fraternity, [René] Descartes stands out. From him did we get practical discoveries like coordinates in geometry and the law of refraction of light. But what he really did was to shake loose the human mind from the shackles of centuries of stultifying religious orthodoxy by creating an entirely original approach to reasoning: the Cartesian method.

The Soviets were not 50% right, they were entirely wrong. They weren’t quantitatively wrong about the amount of variance due to the environment, they were qualitatively wrong about what environmental manipulations could do in the face of built-in universal human machinery. Having said this, though, I now feel no particular impulse to vote Republican. Also, it’s quite possible that someday you could create perfectly unselfish people… if you used sufficiently advanced neurosurgery, drugs, and/or brain-computer interfaces to engineer their brains into a new state that no current human brain occupies. Whether or not this is in fact possible isn’t something that ideology gets to decide. The reasoning errors of past communists can’t prohibit any particular future technological advance from being possible or practical. Having said that, I feel no particular impulse to turn “liberal.

Once, I was doing a late-night case with one of the neurosurgery attendings, a suboccipital craniectomy for a brain-stem malformation. It’s one of the most elegant surgeries, in perhaps the most difficult part of the body—just getting there is tricky, no matter how experienced you are. But that night, I felt fluid: the instruments were like extensions of my fingers; the skin, muscle, and bone seemed to unzip themselves; and there I was, staring at a yellow, glistening bulge, a mass deep in the brain stem. Suddenly, the attending stopped me. “Paul, what happens if you cut two millimeters deeper right here?” He pointed. Neuroanatomy slides whirred through my head. “Double vision?” “No,” he said. “Locked-in syndrome.” Another two millimeters, and the patient would be completely paralyzed, save for the ability to blink. He didn’t look up from the microscope. “And I know this because the third time I did this operation, that’s exactly what happened.” Neurosurgery requires a commitment to one’s own excellence and a commitment to another’s identity. The decision to operate at all involves an appraisal of one’s own abilities, as well as a deep sense of who the patient is and what she holds dear. Certain brain areas are considered near-inviolable, like the primary motor cortex, damage to which results in paralysis of affected body parts. But the most sacrosanct regions of the cortex are those that control language. Usually located on the left side, they are called Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas; one is for understanding language and the other for producing it. Damage to Broca’s area results in an inability to speak or write, though the patient can easily understand language. Damage to Wernicke’s area results in an inability to understand language; though the patient can still speak, the language she produces is a stream of unconnected words, phrases, and images, a grammar without semantics. If both areas are damaged, the patient becomes an isolate, something central to her humanity stolen forever. After someone suffers a head trauma or a stroke, the destruction of these areas often restrains the surgeon’s impulse to save a life: What kind of life exists without language? When I was a med student,

I didn’t like general surgery and I wanted to get out. I disliked general surgery so much I was willing to sacrifice trying for a position in the neurosurgery

Over the years, I have repeated Eric’s advice to countless people, encouraging them to reduce their career spreadsheets to one column: potential for growth. Of course, not everyone has the opportunity or the desire to work in an industry like high tech. But within any field, there are jobs that have more potential for growth than others. Those in more established industries can look for the rocket ships within their companies—divisions or teams that are expanding. And in careers like teaching or medicine, the corollary is to seek out positions where there is high demand for those skills. For example, in my brother’s field of pediatric neurosurgery, there are some cities with too many physicians, while others have too few. My brother has always elected to work where his expertise would be in demand so he can have the greatest impact. Just

Maybe, just maybe, if you saw these things through my eyes, you’d be a better patient or visitor. Remember: I’m in a neurosurgery ward after all. So

The joy of neurosurgery is in allowing one's patients to live longer, happier, and more meaningful lives, be it from the simplest or most complicated of operations... If you do your job well, you scrub out of the operating room knowing that you have given your patients a chance to return to their previous lives, before their illnesses started to define who they were and limit what they could do. On a lucky day, you may even save them from dying.

Relax and trust the best Neurologist in Shimoga for you. Neurosurgery can be scary but Nanjappa Hospital bring you the best Neurology in Shimoga. Look no further!

Let your burning desire to do something meaningful destroy pressure. Let your actions be driven by your expectations for yourself, not external forces.

keep walking when you think about laziness, keep running when you think about walk keep flying when you think about run

neurosurgeon. I graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1976 with a major in chemistry and earned my M.D. at Duke University Medical School in 1980. During my eleven years of medical school and residency training at Duke as well as Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard, I focused on neuroendocrinology, the study of the interactions between the nervous system and the endocrine system—the series of glands that release the hormones that direct most of your body’s activities. I also spent two of those eleven years investigating how blood vessels in one area of the brain react pathologically when there is bleeding into it from an aneurysm—a syndrome known as cerebral vasospasm. After completing a fellowship in cerebrovascular neurosurgery in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in the United Kingdom, I spent fifteen years on the faculty of Harvard Medical School as an associate professor of surgery, with a specialization in neurosurgery. During those years I operated on countless patients, many of them with severe, life-threatening brain conditions.

People say things move more slowly in situations like this, and they’re right. My mind watched the action in the microseconds that followed as if it were watching a movie in slow motion. The instant I saw the pilot chute, my arms flew to my sides and I straightened my body into a head dive, bending ever so slightly at the hips. The verticality gave me increased speed, and the bend allowed my body to add first a little, then a blast of horizontal motion as my body became an efficient wing, sending me zipping past Chuck just in front of his colorful blossoming Para-Commander parachute. I passed him going at over 150 miles per hour, or 220 feet per second. Given that speed, I doubt he saw the expression on my face. But if he had, he would have seen a look of sheer astonishment. Somehow I had reacted in microseconds to a situation that, had I actually had time to think about it, would have been much too complex for me to deal with. And yet . . . I had dealt with it, and we both landed safely. It was as if, presented with a situation that required more than its usual ability to respond, my brain had become, for a moment, superpowered. How had I done it? Over the course of my twenty-plus-year career in academic neurosurgery—of studying the brain, observing how it works, and operating on it—I have had plenty of opportunities to ponder this very question. I finally chalked it up to the fact that the brain is truly an extraordinary device: more extraordinary than we can even guess. I realize now that the real answer to that question is much more profound. But I had to go through a complete metamorphosis of my life and worldview to glimpse that answer. This book is about the events that changed my mind on the matter. They convinced me that, as marvelous a mechanism as the brain is, it was not my brain that saved my life that day at all. What sprang into action the second Chuck’s chute started to open was another, much deeper part of me. A part that could move so fast because it was not stuck in time at all, the way the brain and body are.

Spiders are by no means the only creatures that need to fear the parasitic wasps’ coercive tactics. And drugs are not the wasps’ only weapons for gaining the compliance of their victims. Ampulex compressa, better known as the jewel wasp because of its iridescent blue-green sheen, performs neurosurgery to achieve its aims. Its quarry is the annoyingly familiar American cockroach (Periplaneta americana). Not to be confused with the comparatively diminutive German roach common up north, this species prefers warmer climes and can grow as big as a mouse. Though dwarfed in stature by its prey, a female jewel wasp that has caught the scent of an American roach will aggressively pursue and attack it—even if that means following the fleeing insect into a house. The roach puts up a mighty struggle, flailing its legs and tucking in its head to fend off the attack, but usually to no avail. With lightning speed, the wasp stings the roach’s midsection, injecting an agent that will temporarily paralyze it so that the behemoth will stay still for the delicate procedure to follow. Like an evil doctor wielding a syringe, she again inserts her stinger, this time into the roach’s brain, and gingerly moves it around for half a minute or so until she finds exactly the right spot, whereupon she injects a venom. Shortly thereafter, the paralytic agent delivered by the first sting wears off. In spite of having full use of its limbs and the same ability to sense its surroundings as any normal roach, it’s strangely submissive. The venom, according to Frederic Libersat, a neuroethologist at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, has turned the roach into a “zombie” that will henceforth take its orders from the wasp and willingly tolerate her abuse. Indeed, the roach doesn’t protest in the least when she twists off part of one of its antennae with her powerful mandible and proceeds to suck the liquid oozing from it like soda from a straw. The wasp then does the same thing to its other antenna and, assured that the roach will go nowhere, leaves it alone for about twenty minutes as she searches for a burrow where she’ll lay an egg to be nourished by the roach. Meanwhile, her brainwashed slave busies itself grooming—picking fungal spores, tiny worms, and other parasites off itself—providing a sterile surface for the wasp to glue its egg. When the wasp returns, she seizes the roach by the stump of one of its antennae and “walks it like a dog on a leash to her burrow,” said Libersat. Thanks to its cooperation, she doesn’t have to waste energy dragging the massive roach. Equally important, he said, she doesn’t “need to paralyze all the respiratory system, so the thing will stay alive and fresh. Her larvae need to feed five or six days on this fresh meat, which you don’t want to rot.” The

What I’d like to say is that good trauma work is like very fine neurosurgery. It is extremely skilled work. And good intentions and warm feelings do not substitute for really becoming very good at what you do.

Patients may not know how to measure clinical outcomes, and they may not understand the technical know-how that a doctor must have in order to perform a complex heart surgery or neurosurgery, but they can form clear judgments about their experience. They know whether their rooms are clean and whether people are polite to them. They recognize differences in the quality of the food and in how an organization looks and feels. They know whether they feel cared for. Most of all, they can tell whether they’ve had a healing experience—or whether being in a hospital has only impeded their healing.

My book contains texts that I wrote during college, medical school and during my residency of neurosurgery. I could set the book �Thoughts from the hospital" as clippings thoughts

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

Eight floors of the kind of consumer garbage that L.A. is famous for. Need a Ferrari jacket? Sure. You’re a race car driver. Vroom vroom. Need silk designer socks that cost more than neurosurgery? We have that too. Come on down to the Beverly Center for something bright and shiny and leave feeling poorer, puzzled, and dead inside.

In the incredibly complex world of neurosurgery, _____ has done something incredibly simple. He's been kind.

THE JAPANESE HAD already forgotten more neurosurgery than the Chinese had ever known. The black clinics of Chiba were the cutting edge, whole bodies of technique supplanted monthly, and still they couldn’t repair the damage he’d suffered in that Memphis hotel.

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.

2451-9, 2006.

One thing I've heard (and seen) over and over is how much deeper an understanding people have of mental illness once they've gone through it themselves (directly or indirectly via someone they love). Any experience cuts closer when you know it firsthand. It follows that health practitioners care better for depressed and suicidal people if they've been there. But imagine if the only competent oncologists were ones in remission for cancer; if the only decent obstetricians were ones who'd given birth; if only the superannuated could be geriatricians and a neurosurgery prerequisite was having had someone slice into their own brain. Surely the very starting point for trained clinicians in a "caring profession" is basic human empathy—and learning! And putting learning into practice!—to be able to provide adequate, evidence-based mental health care and not be insensitive assholes about it.

Had the confirmation of my fears—in the CT scan, in the lab results, both showing not merely cancer but a body overwhelmed, nearing death—released me from the duty to serve, from my duty to patients, to neurosurgery, to the pursuit of goodness? Yes, I thought, and therein was the paradox: like a runner crossing the finish line only to collapse, without that duty to care for the ill pushing me forward, I became an invalid." 55%