The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby

Jean-Dominique Bauby
Locked in

able to move only his left eye

he writes this entire book
and records for us some of his thoughts and experiences

then we sit

with our catered lunch
and try to put ourselves in his shoes

would we want to go on living?
better to be happy demented than fully with it yet locked in?

hard questions without clear answers

A Fortunate Man: The Stories of a Country Doctor by John Berger

"It is generally assumed that doctors take a professional view of suffering"

"Doctors use a technical, entirely unemotional language".

"Increasing specialization encourages an increasingly scientific view of illness". 

"He never separates an illness from the total personality of the patient- in this sense, he is the opposite of a specialist."

"Most important of all, he considers that it is his duty to try and treat at least certain forms of unhappiness". 

"He can try to extend the meaning of sex for them. But the more he thinks of educating them - according to the demands of their very own minds and bodies before they have become resigned, before they accept life as they find it - the more he has to ask himself: by what right do I do this? It is not certain that it will make them socially happier. It is not what is expected or wanted of me. In the end he compromises - as the limitations of his energy would anyway force him to do; he helps in an individual problem , he suggests an answer here and an answer there, he tries to remove a fear without destroying the whole edifice of the morality of which it is part, he introduces the possibility of a hitherto unseen pleasure or satisfaction without extrapolating to the idea of a fundamentally different way of life."

"If the man can begin to feel recognized - and such recognition may well include aspects of his character which he has not yet recognized himself - the hopeless nature of his unhappiness will have been changed: he may even have the chance of being happy."

"How is it that Sassall is acknowledged as a good doctor?"

"He is acknowledged as a good doctor because he meets the deep but unformulated expectation of the sick for a sense of fraternity. He recognizes them. Sometimes he fails - often because he has missed a critical opportunity and the patient's suppressed resentment becomes too hard to break through - but there is about him the constant will of a man trying to recognize."

"It is as though when he talks or listens to a patient, he is also touching them with his hands so as to be less likely to misunderstand: and it is as though, when he is physically examining a patient, they were also conversing."

"Previously the sense of mastery which Sassell gained was the result of the skill with which he dealt with emergencies. The possible complications would all appear to develop within his own field: they were medical complications. He remained the central character. 

Now the patient is the central character. He tries to recognize each patient and, having recognized him, he tries to set an example for him - not a morally improving example, but an example wherein the patient can recognize himself... he 'becomes' each patient in order to 'improve' that patient. He 'becomes' the patient by offering him hi own example back. He 'improves' him by curing or at least alleviating his suffering. Yet patient succeeds patient whilst he remains the same person, and so the effect is cumulative. His sense of mastery is fed by the ideal of striving toward the universal."

There is so much more in this essay, so much I cannot yet understand. In that way, I mark this as something that I must come back to, maybe repeatedly, in an attempt to build off of, and not just repeat Sassell's journey.

Interestingly, Sassell committed suicide, though many have suspected that he suffered from bipolar disorder, and never received cognitive behavioral therapy.

Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

"When someone sees the same people every day, they wind up becoming part of that person's life. And then they want the person to change. If someone isn't what others want them to be, the others become angry. Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but non about his or her own."

I really enjoy reading books like this, just told like a story, with some morals but often just telling of things that happen, without too much interpretation, letting you make of it what you will.

Two books finished and only on the second day of basic science!
So strange how medical school ebbs and flows...

A Short Guide to a Happy Life by Anna Quindlen

"Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work"

"remember that love is not leisure, it is work"

I'm trying to decide exactly how those two statements fit together...

Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage

Didn't actually finish this one. Seems like John was quite a character. Lots of his notes and letters remind me of my dad. Statements that are heavy on facts and observations and descriptions.

One of my mentors encouraged me to read some of this since I have set out to study how silence is used in medical conversations, and John Cage explored silence in music.

Anyway, I could only renew it twice, and now I'm in between shelf exams and should really keep reviewing my flashcards for neurology, so I'm just going to go check this book back in to the library and get back to remembering what mesial temporal sclerosis looks like on MRI images.