This was not guilt: guilt is what you feel when you have done something wrong. What I felt was shame: I was what was wrong.

I talked to over two hundred patients and family members about their experiences with aging, serious illnesses, and the big unfixables. But I also spoke with scores of physicians, and especially geriatricians, palliative care doctors, hospice nurses, and nursing home workers. The biggest thing I found was that when these clinicians were at their best, they were recognizing that people had priorities besides merely living longer. The most important and reliable way that we can understand what people's priorities are, besides just living longer, is to simply ask. And we don't ask.

I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn't one of them.

You can't make a recipe for something as complicated as surgery. Instead, you can make a recipe for how to have a team that's prepared for the unexpected.

Just using a checklist requires [doctors] to embrace different values from ones we've had, like humility, discipline, teamwork.

What is the alternative to understanding the complexity of the world?

If I became just a brain in a jar - as long as I can communicate back and forth with people, that would be okay with me.