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

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

We have medicalized aging, and that experiment is failing us.

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

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.

In many ways, the effort to study philosophy was my rebellion away from medicine. I'm the son of two Indian immigrant physicians, so the natural path for me would have been to become a doctor. I ended up doing the master's degree at Oxford in politics, philosophy, and economics while already having a seat in medical school. I was keeping that as my escape hatch. But my hope was that I might become a philosopher or something else entirely.