A failure often does not have to be a failure at all. However, you have to be ready for it-will you admit when things go wrong? Will you take steps to set them right?-because the difference between triumph and defeat, you'll find, isn't about willingness to take risks. It's about mastery of rescue.

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.

As economists have often pointed out, we pay doctors for quantity, not quality. As they point out less often, we also pay them as individuals, rather than as members of a team working together for their patients. Both practices have made for serious problems.

If we took away the ability to put defibrillators in people in their last years, people would be shouting in the streets.

The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one's life.

This is the reality of intensive care: at any point, we are as apt to harm as we are to heal.

We've created a multitrillion-dollar edifice for dispensing the medical equivalent of lottery tickets - and have only the rudiments of a system to prepare patients for the near certainty that those tickets will not win. Hope is not a plan, but hope is our plan.