However, the chicken soup of "May the world be gentle to you" doesn't work here. Death sweeps in mercilessly, taking away care, companionship, happiness and laughter indiscriminately.

The title is "How Long Have I Got Left"

Lucy wrote: "He did not pretend to be brave, nor did he have false beliefs. , believes that cancer can be 'overcome' or 'conquered'

He understands that the doctor's duty is sometimes not to save the patient's life, but to be a guide and guide the patient and their families through the difficulties in life. Hard times can lead to new lives later

Stories of life and death and the heartbreaking cries that accompany them are the soundtrack to a better life in such a depressing environment. To continue to operate, doctors must put a protective shield on their personal emotions.

The doctor’s job is like connecting two rails together to make the patient’s journey smooth. ”

Then fancies fly away He'll fear not what men say He'll labor night and day To be a pilgrim Keep moving forward)

The meaning of life is all-encompassing, but every single point of life ultimately exists to bridge the past and the future.

I am limited now, but we are infinite in the future.

We walk with miracles, but we look for miracles outside ourselves: Africa, the cradle of mankind, and her wonders are all contained in our bodies; we are the bold and adventurous creations of nature, and those who study nature If you are wise, it is enough to study human beings in an outline and clear outline, while others are diligent in their pursuit, immersed in fragmented fragments and voluminous volumes.

The Book of Death, which separated me from the vitality around me, became my own dying body.

"The doctor will be here soon." Ever since, the future I imagined, the future that was about to come true, and the impending peak of life after so many years of struggle, all disappeared with these words.

There is no feeling at all that I am trying to build a career and get promoted. Instead, I feel like a busy and noisy electron that is about to reach escape velocity and fly into a strange and starry universe.

In my eyes, literature not only describes the lives of others, but also provides us with the richest material for moral reflection.

If a life without introspection is not worth living, then is a life that has not been truly lived still worth introspection?

Look at a slight hint of sky blue emerging from the eastern horizon. This is the sun’s vanguard, slowly wiping away the twinkling stars. The sky is clear and the sun is shining in the east, but the night in the west shows no sign of surrender.

I can't help but feel that I am a tiny speck of dust, but I can still feel my feet stepping on the earth, and I am convinced that I exist between this solemn and majestic heaven and earth.

The present is the cusp of the storm, and the accumulated experience in life is worn away and consumed by the details of survival. The peak of our wisdom is the present moment of life.

Yes, the brain can give us the ability to form relationships and make life meaningful. But sometimes, the brain disrupts this ability.

I suddenly realized that many of the things that literary studies mainly focus on are too political and anti-scientific.

I feel increasingly strongly that the key to having substantive moral opinions on issues of life and death lies in direct experience with them.

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However, this is not a simple sin, not just autopsy, but everything in medicine is an affront to the sacred.

What they see are people when they are most vulnerable, fearful and private. They healed the sick and escorted them back to the mortal world, but they turned around and left. Treating corpses as ordinary objects and machines is precisely what alleviates the deepest human suffering. Likewise, the deepest human suffering is only a teaching tool.

These winding lines on the paper are not just simple lines, but the whole process from heart trembling to heart stopping.

Newland recalled a game he used to play as a child - poking his fingers into his grandmother's skin to see if it would return to its original shape. This is a sign that she is getting older.

Thinking of Thomas Browne's "A Doctor's Faith": "We have no way of knowing what kind of conflicts and pain we will encounter when we are born in the world, but it is usually difficult for us to escape from them."

In my eyes, this wound is just a lot of disorganized tissue, but to the surgeon, it is all orderly, like a sculptor looking at a piece of uncarved marble.

I have clearly realized that learning to be a doctor in the ward and being a medical student in the classroom are completely different educations. Reading and doing multiple-choice questions are nothing like taking action with a heavy responsibility.

"Which is worse, being born too early or being born too late?" "You have to judge for yourself." This judgment is too difficult. The hardest decision of my entire life has been whether I want French dip or Reuben dip for my sandwich.

Perhaps Beckett's Pozzo is right, life is fleeting, too short to think too much. But I must concentrate on playing the imminent role and devote myself wholeheartedly to the whole process of death. I am the gravedigger with pliers.

Indeed, 99% of job selections in this world are like this: salary, working environment, and working hours. That's just the way it is.

As I sat there, I suddenly realized that those questions about life, death and meaning, those questions that everyone must face at some point, usually occur in hospitals. When one actually encounters these problems, it becomes a practice, with both philosophical and biological meanings. Human beings are living beings and follow the laws of nature. Unfortunately, these laws include one: entropy is always increasing, and life is impermanent. Disease means that the order of molecules is disrupted; the basic requirement of life is metabolism, and death means the termination of metabolism.

I think this is like the ancient Greek concept of "arete", which is a virtue that reaches the highest level of moral, emotional, mental and physical excellence.

I no longer regard any patient simply as words on a medical record, but rather treat all documents and medical records as real patients.

The attraction of neurosurgery to me lies not only in the entanglement of the brain and consciousness, but also in the entanglement of life and death.

A resident in the emergency room provided cover for me, and I slipped back like a ghost and "rescued" the ice cream sandwich from the body of the patient I couldn't save.

I fear that I am about to become one of Tolstoy's typical doctors, immersed in empty formalism, making diagnoses by rote, and completely ignoring the larger meaning of humanity.

My highest ideal is not to save lives, but to guide patients or their families to understand death or illness.

I gave up the role I usually played most, no longer the enemy of death, but the messenger. I have to help these families understand that the person they knew, that vibrant, whole person, now only exists in the past, and I need their help in deciding the future they want.

When patients hear the neurosurgeon’s diagnosis, their eyes look like disintegrated fragments—this metaphor is most appropriate.

If it’s a big bowl of tragedy, it’s best to feed it slowly, spoonful by spoonful. Few patients require eating in one sitting, and most require time to digest.

After all, one of the original meanings of the word "patient" in English is "a person who endures suffering without complaint."

There is a saying among residents: the days are long but the years are short.

Time in the operating room is very interesting. No matter whether you are rushing forward like crazy or taking it slow and steady, you can't feel the passage of time. Heidegger once said: Boredom is to feel the passage of time. The feeling of surgery, then, is exactly the opposite: the concentration on work makes the hands of the clock lose all meaning and move any way they want.

Generally speaking, they are in the left brain, called Wernicke's area and Broca's area. One understands language and the other produces language. Damage to Broca's area results in loss of the ability to write and speak, although the patient's ability to understand language remains normal. Damage to Wernicke's area will cause people to lose the ability to understand language, and their speech will be incoherent, incomplete, and meaningless. If both areas are damaged, the patient becomes an island, and the core of his or her humanity is lost forever.

Job offers were pouring in from all over the country.

My feeling is that the ropes of physiology, morality, life and death, which were originally separate, have finally begun to intertwine with each other.

Death will not let any of us go. We and the patients, living and breathing, as metabolizing living beings, are all destined by fate. Most people are passive from birth to death - this is a reality that you and those around you need to accept.

Even if you are perfect, the world is not. The secret is that the secret that supports us to continue is to understand that from the moment the cards are dealt, you will definitely lose, your hands will be slippery, and you will make mistakes in judgment, but even so, you must try your best to fight for the patient to the end.

If I were to compile a book, I would compile a record of human death, with the following annotation: He who teaches others to die can also teach others to live. ——"To study philosophy is to learn to die", Michel de Montaigne

I am no longer a priest or shepherd who can assist in the transition between life and death; I find that I am that confused and confused person. Measures, sheep that need to be educated. A serious illness is not meant to change your life, but to shatter your life into pieces. It feels like a miracle has come, a strong light suddenly piercing your eyes, illuminating what is really important; in fact, it feels more like someone has just used an incendiary bomb to destroy your single-minded path forward. Now I must take a detour.

There is a paradox here: I am like a long-distance runner who is approaching the finish line and collapses. The responsibility of caring for patients no longer drove me forward because I had become a patient myself.

Alexander Pope said: "The greatest danger is a little knowledge; drink deeply, or you will not taste the sweet spring of knowledge."

I began to realize that being so close to my own death felt like nothing had changed and yet everything had changed.

But what I desire now is to live, but what I have faith in is death. The two are completely opposite.

The anxiety caused by facing death is far from being alleviated by the "probability" of data.

I began to have two perspectives on the world, looking at death as a doctor and as a patient. As a doctor, I know better than to claim that “cancer is a battle I will win” or ask “why me?” (The answer is: Why not me?)

Facing my own death, I am struggling, should I rebuild my old life or find a new one?

If my life is made up of many sentences, then I have changed from the subject of each sentence to the direct object. In fourteenth-century philosophical treatises, the word "patient" means "an object of action," and that's how I feel now.

I discovered many years ago that Darwin and Nietzsche have the same view: the most important characteristic of living organisms is the struggle to survive. A life without struggle is like a tiger without stripes in a painting.

So, isn’t such a terminal illness a good gift for a young person who wants to understand death? What better way to understand than to experience it yourself?

Complete this quote from Samuel Beckett. I read this sentence many years ago when I was an undergraduate: I will still move forward.

Moral obligations have weight, and things with weight have gravity, so the gravity of moral responsibility pulled me back to the operating room.

My familiar brain, a peach with ravines, is calling me.

Once a person encounters a stubborn illness, the most important thing to be careful about is the constant change of values. As you think hard about what you value, the answers will follow. It felt like my credit card was taken away and I had to learn how to bargain.

I suddenly realized that I had gone through the five stages of grief, which is the cliché "denial→anger→bargaining→depression→acceptance". But I did it completely the other way around.

However, I just knew that I was going to die - but I knew that before. The things I know are still the same, but I can no longer meet friends and enjoy a normal life like I used to.

Perhaps in the absence of any certainty, we should assume that we will live a long time. Maybe this is the only way forward.

She did the challenge I set to myself years ago when I aspired to become a doctor: look into my soul, accept my responsibilities as a mortal, and let me find myself again.

Rather than restoring my original identity, Emma protected my ability to create new ones.

Many atheists like to quote a sentence from Nobel Prize winner and French biologist Jacques Monod, but this sentence actually conceals an apocalyptic feature of atheism: Many atheists I like to quote a sentence from the Nobel Prize winner and French biologist Jacques Monod [illustration], but this sentence actually conceals an apocalyptic feature of atheism: The ancient holy words have been destroyed, and mankind finally knows that he himself He is a lonely existence in this cold and vast universe, and his birth in this universe was also accidental.

Struggling towards the ultimate truth, but finding that this is an impossible task; in other words, it is possible to find the correct answer, but it is absolutely impossible to prove this answer. There is no doubt that what each of us can ultimately see is only a part of life. Doctors see one aspect, patients see another, engineers, economists, pearl divers, alcoholics, cable TV repairmen, shepherds, Indian beggars, priests...all see things differently. No one person can completely encompass all human cognition. Cognition emerges from what we create, from our relationships to each other and to the world, and can never be complete. And the ultimate truth is above all else, and where it exists, the sower and the reaper can rejoice together, just like at the end of the Sunday sermon on the Bible. Because, in the ultimate truth, there is a saying that is clear: "One sows, and another reaps." I sent you to reap what you did not put in the effort; the hard work belongs to others, and you share theirs. Fruits of labor.

"Are you on duty this weekend, doctor?" "No." Maybe never. "Is there any surgery today?" "No." Maybe there won't be any more. "Ah, good. That's the happy ending! The work is done. I like happy endings, do you too, doctor?" "Yes, yes, I like happy endings too."

Before I got sick, my life could be said to be that all my wishes came true and I was moving smoothly according to the established track. In most modern literary works, the fate of characters is determined by their own actions and those of others.

But now, the world I live in is different. This is an older world, where human actions pale in comparison to superhuman power. This world is more Greek tragedy than Shakespeare's.

"This is not the end," she said.

She has probably used this rhetoric thousands of times. Thinking about myself, haven’t I said similar things to patients? Anyway, she would definitely say this to those who are looking for impossible answers. "It's not even the beginning of the end. It's just the end of the beginning." It turns out that doctors also need to hope for new growth. Looking into the infinitely vast future, what I see is not a deserted, empty wasteland, but something simpler and purer: a blank page on which I will continue to write.

If time expands when a person moves at high speed, will time shrink if he is almost motionless? It has to be: every day seems a lot shorter now.

For me now, time is not so much the ticking of a clock, but a state of survival.

Graham Green once said that a person's true life is in the first twenty years, and the rest is just a reflection of the past.

Faced with the limits of life, everyone will succumb. I think I am not the only one who enters this past perfect tense. Most dreams and ambitions are either realized or abandoned, and in any case belong to the past. And my future is no longer a ladder leading to gradually higher life goals, but a smooth road, laid out into the eternal present.

I would often throw his untouched lunch into the trash, covering the previously untouched breakfast. A few hours later, untouched dinner was poured on top.

I refused all visits from outside my family, and Paul’s world became smaller, but he told me: “I want everyone to know that even if I don’t see them, I still love them. I cherish being with them. Friendship, one less drink won't change anything."

Paul turned to look at me and whispered: "Maybe this is the end."

Ready. What he meant was: ready to be weaned off breathing assistance, ready to inject morphine, ready to die.

In a sense, When Breath Becomes Air is an unfinished book, primarily because Paul's condition deteriorated dramatically. But this unfinished nature is precisely part of the true meaning of the book, reflecting the reality faced by Paul. In the last year of his life, Paul kept writing. Completing this book became his purpose in life, and the limited time left urged him to seize the time.

This may be my purpose. I don’t use death to sensationalize people, and I don’t tell everyone in the cliché that ‘flowers can only be cut when they bloom’. Instead, I tell everyone what they will face along the way.

"The prophet is always the speaker," Emerson wrote. "His dreams are always made known to the world in some way, and he always announces them with solemn joy."

One of the ways to face a terminal illness is to love deeply—to be vulnerable, to be kind, generous, and grateful.

The most wonderful and profound years of my life - daily actions between life and death, a balance of joy and pain, a deeper exploration of gratitude and love.

He was honest and sincere. His originally planned future became hopeless. He expressed his grief, but at the same time he created a new future.

He is buried on the edge of a field in the Santa Cruz Mountains, overlooking the Pacific Ocean and coastline.

This place reminds me of a prayer my grandfather once loved: "We will rise slowly and unknowingly to the top of the eternal mountain, where the wind is so cool and the scenery there is so brilliant." ”

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