Surgery Went Well Quotes

Fifty percent of all doctors graduate in the bottom half of their class - Hope your surgery went well!

Isaac out of surgery. It went well. He's officially NEC. NEC meant "no evidence of cancer." A second text came a few seconds later. I mean, he's blind. So that's unfortunate.

Those clothes are Susie's,' my father said calmly when he reached him. Buckley looked down at my blackwatch dress that he held in his hand. My father stepped closer, took the dress from my brother, and then, without speaking, he gathered the rest of my clothes, which Buckley had piled on the lawn. As he turned in silence toward the house, hardly breathing, clutching my clothes to him, it sparked. I was the only one to see the colors. Just near Buckley's ears and on the tips of his cheeks and chin he was a little orange somehow, a little red. Why can't I use them?' he asked. It landed in my father's back like a fist. Why can't I use those clothes to stake my tomatoes?' My father turned around. He saw his son standing there, behind him the perfect plot of muddy, churned-up earth spotted with tiny seedlings. 'How can you ask me that question?' You have to choose. It's not fair,' my brother said. Buck?' My father held my clothes against his chest. I watched Buckley flare and light. Behind him was the sun of the goldenrod hedge, twice as tall as it had been at my death. I'm tired of it!' Buckley blared. 'Keesha's dad died and she's okay?' Is Keesha a girl at school?' Yes!' My father was frozen. He could feel the dew that had gathered on his bare ankles and feet, could feel the ground underneath him, cold and moist and stirring with possibility. I'm sorry. When did this happen?' That's not the point, Dad! You don't get it.' Buckley turned around on his heel and started stomping the tender tomato shoots with his foot. Buck, stop!' my father cried. My brother turned. You don't get it, Dad,' he said. I'm sorry,' my father said. These are Susie's clothes and I just... It may not make sense, but they're hers-something she wore.' ... You act like she was yours only!' Tell me what you want to say. What's this about your friend Keesha's dad?' Put the clothes down.' My father laid them gently on the ground. It isn't about Keesha's dad.' Tell me what it is about.' My father was now all immediacy. He went back to the place he had been after his knee surgery, coming up out of the druggie sleep of painkillers to see his then-five-year-old son sitting near him, waiting for his eyes to flicker open so he could say, 'Peek-a-boo, Daddy.' She's dead.' It never ceased to hurt. 'I know that.' But you don't act that way.' Keesha's dad died when she was six. Keesha said she barely even thinks of him.' She will,' my father said. But what about us?' Who?' Us, Dad. Me and Lindsey. Mom left becasue she couldn't take it.' Calm down, Buck,' my father said. He was being as generous as he could as the air from his lungs evaporated out into his chest. Then a little voice in him said, Let go, let go, let go. 'What?' my father said. I didn't say anything.' Let go. Let go. Let go. I'm sorry,' my father said. 'I'm not feeling very well.' His feet had grown unbelievably cold in the damp grass. His chest felt hollow, bugs flying around an excavated cavity. There was an echo in there, and it drummed up into his ears. Let go. My father dropped down to his knees. His arm began to tingle on and off as if it had fallen asleep. Pins and needles up and down. My brother rushed to him. Dad?' Son.' There was a quaver in his voice and a grasping outward toward my brother. I'll get Grandma.' And Buckley ran. My father whispered faintly as he lay on his side with his face twisted in the direction of my old clothes: 'You can never choose. I've loved all three of you.

New Rule: Now that liberals have taken back the word "liberal," they also have to take back the word "elite." By now you've heard the constant right-wing attacks on the "elite media," and the "liberal elite." Who may or may not be part of the "Washington elite." A subset of the "East Coast elite." Which is overly influenced by the "Hollywood elite." So basically, unless you're a shit-kicker from Kansas, you're with the terrorists. If you played a drinking game where you did a shot every time Rush Limbaugh attacked someone for being "elite," you'd be almost as wasted as Rush Limbaugh. I don't get it: In other fields--outside of government--elite is a good thing, like an elite fighting force. Tiger Woods is an elite golfer. If I need brain surgery, I'd like an elite doctor. But in politics, elite is bad--the elite aren't down-to-earth and accessible like you and me and President Shit-for-Brains. Which is fine, except that whenever there's a Bush administration scandal, it always traces back to some incompetent political hack appointment, and you think to yourself, "Where are they getting these screwups from?" Well, now we know: from Pat Robertson. I'm not kidding. Take Monica Goodling, who before she resigned last week because she's smack in the middle of the U.S. attorneys scandal, was the third-ranking official in the Justice Department of the United States. She's thirty-three, and though she never even worked as a prosecutor, was tasked with overseeing the job performance of all ninety-three U.S. attorneys. How do you get to the top that fast? Harvard? Princeton? No, Goodling did her undergraduate work at Messiah College--you know, home of the "Fighting Christies"--and then went on to attend Pat Robertson's law school. Yes, Pat Robertson, the man who said the presence of gay people at Disney World would cause "earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor," has a law school. And what kid wouldn't want to attend? It's three years, and you have to read only one book. U.S. News & World Report, which does the definitive ranking of colleges, lists Regent as a tier-four school, which is the lowest score it gives. It's not a hard school to get into. You have to renounce Satan and draw a pirate on a matchbook. This is for the people who couldn't get into the University of Phoenix. Now, would you care to guess how many graduates of this televangelist diploma mill work in the Bush administration? On hundred fifty. And you wonder why things are so messed up? We're talking about a top Justice Department official who went to a college founded by a TV host. Would you send your daughter to Maury Povich U? And if you did, would you expect her to get a job at the White House? In two hundred years, we've gone from "we the people" to "up with people." From the best and brightest to dumb and dumber. And where better to find people dumb enough to believe in George Bush than Pat Robertson's law school? The problem here in America isn't that the country is being run by elites. It's that it's being run by a bunch of hayseeds. And by the way, the lawyer Monica Goodling hired to keep her ass out of jail went to a real law school.

I had to become a patient. And I had to make up my mind quickly before the unthinkable happened. So I went under the knife. And I surrendered, knowing surgery can fail, no matter how hard we wish it to succeed. If surgery could end well - without risk - then it wouldn't be surgery as we know it. Without chance, luck, fate, it can't be surgery. They're all vital ingredients of the recipe.

I discussed in detail what to expect over the next couple of days: what the surgery entailed; how we'd shave only a small strip of her hair to keep it cosmetically appealing; how her arm would likely get a little weaker afterward but then stronger again; that if all went well, she'd be out of the hospital in three days; that this was just the first step in a marathon; that getting rest was important; and that I didn't expect them to retain anything I had just said and we'd go over everything again.

play the game of Vogon Civil Service politics, and play it well, and waterproof enough for him to survive indefinitely at sea depths of down to a thousand feet with no ill effects. Not that he ever went swimming of course. His busy schedule would not allow it. He was the way he was because billions of years ago when the Vogons had first crawled out of the sluggish primeval seas of Vogsphere, and had lain panting and heaving on the planet’s virgin shores … when the first rays of the bright young Vogsol sun had shone across them that morning, it was as if the forces of evolution had simply given up on them there and then, had turned aside in disgust and written them off as an ugly and unfortunate mistake. They never evolved again: they should never have survived. The fact that they did is some kind of tribute to the thick-willed slug-brained stubbornness of these creatures. Evolution? they said to themselves, Who needs it?, and what nature refused to do for them they simply did without until such time as they were able to rectify the gross anatomical inconveniences with surgery. Meanwhile, the natural forces on the planet Vogsphere had been working overtime to make up for their earlier blunder. They brought forth scintillating jeweled scuttling crabs, which the Vogons ate, smashing their shells with iron mallets;

Americans struggle with silence.  It seems we must have the radio blaring in the car or a TV on in the house, even if no one is watching.  We can't handle solitude very well.  Yet, solitude is the one thing a deer hunter craves and anticipates.  There are a few times when the woods get so quiet you feel like you are the only living creature around.  It's life-changing!  People are most like themselves in nature.  You can get down to the real you—no veneer, no facade, no masquerade— and it is there that God can do wonders on us.  I like thinking of it as an anesthetic that puts everything to sleep so that surgery can take place. Jesus knew the power of time alone with God, and we also need to know it — by experience.  He would often slip away (Luke 5:16).  The disciples would awaken, look around, and discover that Jesus was gone.  He loved the early morning moments before the world came alive and began buzzing with activity (Mark 1:35-39).  He knew that soon everyone would wipe the sleep out of their eyes, and He would be in high demand.  So, He placed high priority on those private, devoted moments, in order to escape and be alone with His Father.  He didn’t just squeeze in prayer and meditation between all His preaching and miracles.  Someone once said, “Jesus went from place of prayer to place of prayer with teaching and miracles in between.”  I like that.               Those who hunt know the adrenaline rush caused by the crunching leaves as a whitetail slowly approaches.  There is also such a surge when the word of God is read.  I hope you will enjoy both as you read this book.  My greatest satisfaction would be to know that you have found yourself a quiet place to read this book and contemplate the spiritual lessons in it.  When you have even more time, get your Bible and turn to the passages cited and read them more fully.  It will deepen your understanding.

One of my best friends is LinDee Loveland, who is a Bible teacher at OCS and the children’s minister at our church. She and another friend and teacher, Mrs. Rita, were there at the hospital with us. As soon as they heard that everything had gone well, the two of them gathered all of Mia’s cousins together. “Missy, what’s Mia’s room number?” LinDee asked. I rattled it off, then quickly caught up with Jase, who was heading to the recovery room. We spent an hour in the recovery room with Mia, and when she was ready to be moved to her regular hospital room, Jase and I walked beside her gurney. When we walked into her room, I burst into tears. Mia’s room was beautiful! Several weeks before Mia’s scheduled surgery, Mrs. LinDee had asked the children at church to make snowflakes that would be given to a child who needed some encouragement. Mia even made one herself and signed it. “Each individual snowflake is special, and no two are alike,” Mrs. LinDee told them. “It’s the same way with us,” she shared. “No two people are alike. God makes everyone unique and special, with a purpose designed to glorify Him.” Later, when Mia wasn’t there, she asked all the children to make cards for Mia. When LinDee and the cousins scooted out of the waiting room, they went straight to Mia’s room and hung up the cards and the snowflakes all over her room. Mia was awake by the time she got back to her room, and when she saw the decorations, she literally oohed and ahhed. Dr. Sperry and Dr. Genecov both made the same comment when they visited Mia later. “I’ve never seen a room like this! This is the most decorated room that’s ever been in this hospital!” And Dr. Sperry summed it up beautifully: “Wow, somebody must really love you.” Having a room decorated means so much to a child--and maybe even more to a child’s parents. The fact that so many of Mia’s friends had created such exquisite, handmade snowflakes and worked so hard to make cards for her, and that Mrs. LinDee, Mrs. Rita, and all the cousins surprised us with the final display, spoke volumes to me about the way people loved Mia and our family. That expression of creativity was not only beautiful, it also touched my heart deeply.

Two boys named Daniel and Albert were cutting wood in the forest, but they weren't being careful, and Daniel cut off his arm! Albert wrapped Daniel's arm in a plastic bag and took it and Daniel to the hospital. The doctor told Albert, “I can reattach it; just come back in 2 hours.” And 2 hours later, the arm was as good as new! A month later, Daniel and Albert were out cutting wood again, and Daniel cut off his leg! Albert put the leg in a plastic bag and took it and Daniel back to the hospital. The doctor said, “You kids need to be more careful! Come back in 3 hours.” Albert came back 3 hours later, and Daniel's leg was as good as new! A week later, believe it or not, Daniel and Albert were out cutting wood again. Daniel somehow cut his own head off! Albert knew this wasn't good, but he hoped for the best. Albert put Daniel's head in a plastic bag and took it and the rest of Daniel to the hospital. The doctor said, “I can't believe you kids! Well, come back in 4 hours, and I'll see what I can do.” So Albert came back in 4 hours and the doctor said, “I'm sorry, but Daniel didn't make it.” Albert said, “I understand. He did cut his head off after all.” The doctor said, “Actually, the surgery went fine. It's just that he suffocated in that plastic bag!

He put one of the platters in front of Liv, forcing her to get up-close and personal with his dinner creation. It looked even worse on her plate than it had from a distance. Liv was glad she had a strong stomach. She’d seen some fairly disgusting things during nursing school, especially during her surgery rotation and in the burn unit, but none of them were quite as nasty as Baird’s “pizza.” “Well, go ahead. I thought you were starving.” She looked up to see him watching her, black eyebrows raised in anticipation. Oh my God, I’m actually going to have to eat it! Her stomach rolled at the thought. “You, uh, gave me so much I don’t know where to begin,” she lied weakly. “Only one piece.” He frowned. “Is it too much?” “It’s just a little more than I’m used to. Uh, on Earth we cut a pizza into eight or ten wedges.” And we don’t top it with fruit cocktail! “I can cut it into smaller pieces if you want,” he offered. “No, no. That’s okay. I’ll make do.” There was no putting it off anymore. Taking a deep breath, Liv lifted the huge sloppy slice and forced herself to take a bite. “You like it?” Baird stared at her suspiciously. “Mmm, delicious,” Liv mumbled, fighting her gag reflex. Inside her mouth the flavors of canned salmon, lima beans, and fruit cocktail were fighting and she wondered how in the world she would swallow without throwing up. But the big warrior was still watching her carefully for her reaction and she didn’t want to insult him. With a monumental effort she choked down the mess and prayed it wouldn’t come back up. “So it’s good?” he asked again. “Unforgettable,” Liv assured him which for once was the absolute truth. “Glad you like it.” Baird lifted his own piece of pizza and, keeping his eyes on her the entire time, took a huge bite. But when he started to chew, his face turned a peculiar shade of red. “Gods!” Getting up from the table in a hurry, he ran to the sink and spat out the mouthful. Then he turned back to Liv. “That was fuckin’ horrible. Why didn’t you tell me?” Liv shrugged, not sure if she should laugh or feel sorry for him. “I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.” “I’d rather have my feelings hurt than eat that slop.” Baird frowned. “I don’t understand what you humans see in that dish anyway.” “Well…” Liv tried to think of a way to put it tactfully. “We don’t always make it exactly like that.” She nodded at the half a pizza she’d put back down on the metal serving tray. “But I did everything the clerk told me to,” Baird protested. “He said it was mistake proof. That anyone could do it.” “Anyone can do it. You just put a little too much on it, that’s all.” “Damn it to hell.” Baird sighed. “I’m sorry, Olivia. I wanted to make all your favorites—the things I saw you eating in my dreams. It was between this and that other stuff you like with the raw sea creatures rolled in the white grains. I thought this would be easier.” “Sushi?” Liv bit her lip to keep from laughing. “You were going to try and make me sushi?” As badly as he’d screwed up the pizza, she couldn’t imagine what his version of sushi would look like. Visions of a whole dead fish coated in sticky rice and rolled in peas and carrots instead of roe rose to mind. Ugh. Baird shrugged. “I wanted to. I wanted to make you something special every night. But I guess I’m not very good at cooking human food. Sorry.” He sounded so crestfallen and his broad shoulders slumped so sadly that Liv couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. She rose and went to put a hand lightly on his arm. “Hey, don’t worry about it. I’m sure if I tried to make Kindred cuisine I wouldn’t do any better.” Baird

There’s another level at which attention operates, this has to do with leadership, I argue that leaders need three kinds of focus, to be really effective, the first is an inner focus, let me tell you about a case that’s actually from the annals of neurology, there was a corporate lawyer, who unfortunately had a small prefrontal brain tumour, it was discovered early, operated successfully, after the surgery though it was a very puzzling picture, because he was absolutely as smart as he had been before, a very high IQ, no problem with attention or memory, but he couldn’t do his job anymore, he couldn’t do any job, in fact he ended up out of work, his wife left him, he lost his home, he’s living in his brother spare bedroom and in despair he went to see a famous neurologist named Antonio Damasio. Damasio specialized in the circuitry between the prefrontal area which is where we consciously pay attention to what matters now, where we make decisions, where we learn and the emotional centers in the midbrain, particularly the amygdala, which is our radar for danger, it triggers our strong emotions. They had cut the connection between the prefrontal area and emotional centers and Damasio at first was puzzled, he realized that this fellow on every neurological test was perfectly fine but something was wrong, then he got a clue, he asked the lawyer when should we have our next appointment and he realized the lawyer could give him the rational pros and cons of every hour for the next two weeks, but he didn’t know which is best. And Damasio says when we’re making a decision any decision, when to have the next appointment, should I leave my job for another one, what strategy should we follow, going into the future, should I marry this fellow compared to all the other fellows, those are decisions that require we draw on our entire life experience and the circuitry that collects that life experience is very base brain, it’s very ancient in the brain, and it has no direct connection to the part of the brain that thinks in words, it has very rich connectivity to the gastro- intestinal tract, to the gut, so we get a gut feeling, feels right, doesn’t feel right. Damasio calls them somatic markers, it’s a language of the body and the ability to tune into this is extremely important because this is valuable data too - they did a study of Californian entrepreneurs and asked them “how do you make your decisions?”, these are people who built a business from nothing to hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, and they more or less said the same strategy “I am a voracious gatherer of information, I want to see the numbers, but if it doesn’t feel right, I won’t go ahead with the deal”. They’re tuning into the gut feeling. I know someone, I grew up in farm region of California, the Central Valley and my high school had a rival high school in the next town and I met someone who went to the other high school, he was not a good student, he almost failed, came close to not graduating high school, he went to a two-year college, a community college, found his way into film, which he loved and got into a film school, in film school his student project caught the eye of a director, who asked him to become an assistant and he did so well at that the director arranged for him to direct his own film, someone else’s script, he did so well at that they let him direct a script that he had written and that film did surprisingly well, so the studio that financed that film said if you want to do another one, we will back you. And he, however, hated the way the studio edited the film, he felt he was a creative artist and they had butchered his art. He said I am gonna do the film on my own, I’m gonna finance it myself, everyone in the film business that he knew said this is a huge mistake, you shouldn’t do this, but he went ahead, then he ran out of money, had to go to eleven banks before he could get a loan, he managed to finish the film, you may have seen

A decade earlier, her seventy-four-year-old father, Jack Block, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, was admitted to a San Francisco hospital with symptoms from what proved to be a mass growing in the spinal cord of his neck. She flew out to see him. The neurosurgeon said that the procedure to remove the mass carried a 20 percent chance of leaving him quadriplegic, paralyzed from the neck down. But without it he had a 100 percent chance of becoming quadriplegic. The evening before surgery, father and daughter chatted about friends and family, trying to keep their minds off what was to come, and then she left for the night. Halfway across the Bay Bridge, she recalled, “I realized, ‘Oh, my God, I don’t know what he really wants.’” He’d made her his health care proxy, but they had talked about such situations only superficially. So she turned the car around. Going back in “was really uncomfortable,” she said. It made no difference that she was an expert in end-of-life discussions. “I just felt awful having the conversation with my dad.” But she went through her list. She told him, “‘ I need to understand how much you’re willing to go through to have a shot at being alive and what level of being alive is tolerable to you.’ We had this quite agonizing conversation where he said—and this totally shocked me—‘ Well, if I’m able to eat chocolate ice cream and watch football on TV, then I’m willing to stay alive. I’m willing to go through a lot of pain if I have a shot at that.’” “I would never have expected him to say that,

Definitely, my double eyelids surgery went well for me on this Tuesday’s night! Thank goodness! I felt a bit painful, felt sick, a lot dizzy, so tired, so sleepy, relieved, peaceful from my double eyelids surgery! My double eyelids surgery’s surgeon doctor, surgeon’s doctor’s assistant, nurse were so amazing to take care of me even though I was feeling sick from last night’s double eyelids surgery! It’s great that I did my double eyelids surgery on yesterday to finish it up! My double eyelids surgery went well for me on this Tuesday night!

But my favourite cautionary tale is of Australian junior doctor Barry Marshall and his pathologist colleague Robin Warren. In the early 1980s they disagreed with the general medical consensus that most stomach ulcers were caused by stress, bad diet, alcohol, smoking and genetic factors. Instead Marshall and Warren were convinced that a particular bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, was the cause. And if they were right, the solution to many patients’ ulcers could be a simple course of antibiotics, not the risky stomach surgery that was often on the cards. Barry must have picked the short straw, because instead of setting up a test on random members of the public – and having to convince those well-known fun-skewerers of human trials: ethics committees – he just went ahead and swallowed a bunch of the little bugs. Imagine the joy, as his hypothesis was proved right! Imagine the horror, as his stomach became infected, which led to gastritis, the first stage of the stomach ulcers! Imagine his poor wife and family, as the vomiting and halitosis became too much to bear! Dr Marshall lasted 14 days before taking antibiotics to kill the H. pylori, but it was another 20 years before he and Warren were awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. So, hang on, is self-experimenting really that bad if it wins you a Nobel Prize? I guess you can only have a go and find out…but please don’t go as far as US army surgeon Jesse Lazear: in trying to prove that yellow fever was contagious, and that infected blood could be transferred via mosquito bites, he was bitten by one and died. The mosquito that caused his death might not even have been part of his experiment. It’s thought that it could just have been a local specimen. But one that enjoyed both biting humans and dramatic irony. Gastrointestinal elements

The medal had been moved from her shirt to her hospital gown. It had seemed so important to her parents that I mentioned it in passing to the cardiac surgery resident as we sat writing chart notes in the nursing station on the evening before the surgery. He gave me a cynical smile. “Well, to each his own,” he said. “I put my faith in Dr. X,” he said, mentioning the name of the highly respected cardiac surgeon who would be heading Immy’s surgical team in the morning. “I doubt he needs much help from Lourdes.” I made a note to myself to be sure to take the medal off Immy’s gown before she went to surgery in the morning so it wouldn’t get lost in the OR or the recovery room. But I spent that morning in the emergency room, as part of

Immy spent the next day or two undergoing tests, and I saw her several more times. The medal had been moved from her shirt to her hospital gown. It had seemed so important to her parents that I mentioned it in passing to the cardiac surgery resident as we sat writing chart notes in the nursing station on the evening before the surgery. He gave me a cynical smile. “Well, to each his own,” he said. “I put my faith in Dr. X,” he said, mentioning the name of the highly respected cardiac surgeon who would be heading Immy’s surgical team in the morning. “I doubt he needs much help from Lourdes.” I made a note to myself to be sure to take the medal off Immy’s gown before she went to surgery in the morning so it wouldn’t get lost in the OR or the recovery room. But I spent that morning in the emergency room, as part of

I see numerous patients whose physicians have advised them to have angioplasty or bypass surgery but who have decided to try my aggressive nutritional management first. Those who follow the formula described in this book invariably find that their health improves and their chest pains gradually disappear. Of hundreds of cardiac patients treated in this manner, all but a few have done exceptionally well, with chest pain resolving in almost every case (only one went to repeat angioplasty because of a recurrence of chest symptoms), and I have had no patient die from cardiac arrest.