Quotes & Sayings About Operating Room

Of the many 'firsts' with which I have been involved at the Texas Heart Institute - including the first successful human heart transplant in the United States and the first total artificial heart transplant in the world - the achievement that may have the greatest impact on health care did not occur in the operating room or in the research laboratory. It happened on a piece of paper ... when we created the first-ever packaged pricing plan for cardiovascular surgical procedures. — Denton Cooley

Making a record is a lot like surgery without an anesthetic. You first have to cut yourself up the middle. Then you have to rip out every single organ, every single part and lay them on a table. You then need to examine the parts, and the reality of the situation hits you. You find yourself saying things like "I didn't know that part was so ugly." Or "I better get a professional opinion about that." You go to bed hollow and then back into the operating room the next day ... facing every fear, every disgusting thing you hate about yourself. Then you pop it all back in, sew yourself shut and perform ... you perform like your life depended on it
and in those perfect moments you find beauty you never knew existed. You find yourself and you friends all over again, you find something to fight for, something to love. Something to show the world. — Gerard Way

The operating room turns you into somebody who's never wrong. Much like writing."
"Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. The illusion that you may get it right some day is the perversity that draws you on. — Philip Roth

Operating-room errors hold a special terror for patients, if only because they seem like the most avoidable kind of complications. The occasional horror stories of patients who have the wrong leg removed or the wrong knee replaced generate the most headlines, as do tales of patients whose identities are mixed up entirely. — Jeffrey Kluger

I hate stories in which a person has an occupation and you never see him working at it, like all those marvelous Cary Grant movies where he's a surgeon, and you never see him in the operating room. — Tom Wolfe

I don't know. He was hit hard. Bleeding out his mouth, bright red blood, so he probably took a hit to his lung. He was alive when they took him into the operating room . . ." Lucas gave him the details he had, then gave the phone to the highway patrolman, who knew Wood, and Wood confirmed Lucas's status. — John Sandford

I had bought two male chimps from a primate colony in Holland. They lived next to each other in separate cages for several months before I used one as a [heart] donor. When we put him to sleep in his cage in preparation for the operation, he chattered and cried incessantly. We attached no significance to this, but it must have made a great impression on his companion, for when we removed the body to the operating room, the other chimp wept bitterly and was inconsolable for days. The incident made a deep impression on me. I vowed never again to experiment with such sensitive creatures. — Christiaan Barnard

Titus, operating under the terms of the more modest package that he had negotiated with Gwen, which included room, board, and at the end of his own Candy Land path, the ambiguous pink-frosting-roofed gingerbread house of a family to love him and fuck him up, instantly got out of the car, observed the agreed-upon conventions of civilized intercourse among strangers, and got back into the car. The boy was still visiting their planet from his own faraway home world, but Archy figured that with time, he would adjust to the local gravity and microbes. Keeping close to the baby most of the time, as if Clark were the object he had crossed the stellar void to study. — Michael Chabon

In cognitively demanding fields, there are no naturals. Nobody walks into an operating room straight out of a surgical rotation and does world-class neurosurgery. — Malcolm Gladwell

Surgeons are independent doers, ready to act. They prefer not to ask for help, thank you, or to place trust in much outside their own abilities. They work hard, expect perfection, and do not accept excuses. To the residents, some surgeon mentors were decent human beings; others were tyrants. Personalities aside, the central fact was this: Surgeons use their hard-earned physical skills to get results in the operating room (or create their own problems). They rely on themselves for success or failure. They are the captains of their ships. They do not need or want to rely on medication or another person to improve the quality of a patient's life. Surgery is a specialty of instant gratification, for patient and surgeon alike. — Paul A. Ruggieri

I was asked by an NPR reporter once why don't I talk about race that often. I said, 'It's because I'm a neurosurgeon.' And she thought that was a strange response ... I said, 'You see, when I take someone to the operating room, I'm actually operating on the thing that makes them who they are. The skin doesn't make them who they are.' — Ben Carson

When I was twelve, my appendix burst, and as they were wheeling my ass into the operating room, I asked the doctor, "How will this affect my piano playing?" and he said, "Don't worry, you'll still be able to play the piano," and I said, "Wow! I wasn't able to before!" And then they gassed me. — John Scalzi

They go out and visit the kinds of places they are learning about such as the county court system, the grocery store oe the Department of Water and Power. They come back to the classroom and discuss what's going on in the world, and they get wood and tools and construct a scaled-down version of what they have seen. Usually the structure will take up the entire room. If it's a grocery store, then one person will be the manager, another the cashier, or the supplier of produce to the store. They will find out through creative discussion and play what possible problems they can run into operating a grocery store and will work together to solve those problems. — Fiona Whitney

God would grant all of us wisdom, calm, and peace, that his presence would be in the operating room, and that his will might be done. — Benjamin Carson

Enchantment can be done with writing but I think enchantment is basically a prospective or an operating system for life. That you can enchant a person who is assigning your airplane seat, your hotel room, your waiter, your waitress. — Guy Kawasaki

There are a hell of a lot of jobs that are scarier than live comedy. Like standing in the operating room when a guy's heart stops, and you're the one who has to fix it! — Jon Stewart

Miracles happen quietly every day - in an operating room, on a stormy sea, in the sudden appearance of a road side stranger. They are rarely tallied. No one keeps score. — Mitch Albom

I don't know why I resented it so intensely to have them think of me as something newly minted in their private treasury, but it was-I am certain-echoes of that idea that had been sounding in the chambers of my mind from the time we had arrived in Chicago. I wanted to get up and show everyone what a fool he was, to shout at him: I'm a human being, a person - with parents and memories and a history - and I was before you ever wheeled me into that operating room! — Daniel Keyes

As I was wheeled into the operating room I pleaded with
God for one more day, one more week, one more month with her. — Ariana Carruth

One of my surgical giant friends had in his operating room a sign "If the operation is difficult, you aren't doing it right." What he meant was, you have to plan every operation You cannot ever be casual You have to realize that any operation is a potential fatality. — Joseph Murray

I use music in the operating room to help create a healing environment for patients and staff. There is a reason that certain heart rates are healthy and certain beats of music heal and relax us. — Bernie Siegel

Moral duty has weight, things that have weight have gravity, and so the duty to bear mortal responsibility pulled me back into the operating room. Lucy was fully supportive. — Paul Kalanithi

As we're staggering out of the hospital, I don't remember doing this because I was still high, but apparently I turned to the entire operating room staff and screamed "Hey! I'd better not see this on YouTube!" — Bill Engvall

Goofy from lack of sleep, they scribble in snatched moments between classes, part-time employment and their married lives. Their brains are dizzy with words as they mop out an operating room, sort mail at a post office, fix baby's bottle, fry hamburgers. And somewhere, in the midst of their servitude to the must-be, the mad might-be whispers to them to live, know, experience - what? Marvels! The Season in Hell, the Journey to the End of the Night, the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the Clear Light of the Void ... Will any of them make it? Oh, sure. One, at least. Two or three at most - in all these searching thousands. — Christopher Isherwood

Mundane, boring stories
not interesting ones
are the ideal in an operating room. — Wolf Pascoe

My vantage point on the world is the operating room where I see my patients. — Atul Gawande

After three hours, I come back to the waiting room. It is a cosmetic surgery office, so a little like a hotel lobby, underheated and expensively decorated, with candy in little dishes, emerald-green plush chairs, and upscale fashion magazines artfully displayed against the wall.
A young woman comes in, frantic to get a pimple "zapped" before she sees her family over the holidays. An older woman comes in with her daughter for a follow-up visit to a face-lift. She is wearing a scarf and dark glasses. The nurse examines her bruises right out in the waiting room.
And you are in the operating room having your body and your gender legally altered. I feel like laughing, but I know it makes me sound like a lunatic. — Joan Nestle

In my own personal life, God plays a great role in the risk, because I pray before I go into the operating room for every case, and I ask him to give me wisdom, to help me to know what to do - and not only for operating, but for everything. — Ben Carson

Teamwork may just be hard in certain lines of work. Under conditions of extreme complexity, we inevitably rely on a division of tasks and expertise - in the operating room, for example, there is the surgeon, the surgical assistant, the scrub nurse, the circulating nurse, the anesthesiologist, and so on. They can each be technical masters at what they do. That's what we train them to be, and that alone can take years. But the evidence suggests we need them to see their job not just as performing their isolated set of tasks well but also as helping the group get the best possible results. This requires finding a way to ensure that the group lets nothing fall between the cracks and also adapts as a team to whatever problems might arise. — Atul Gawande

If you look at some of the clips of me in the operating room, I sit in the chair, I control the microscope with my mouth, I connect, my hands are always working in the brain, my feet are controlling everything. — Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa

I've always thought that my exposure to competitive sports helped me a great deal in the operating room. It teaches you endurance, and it teaches you how to cope with defeat, and with complications of all sort. I think I'm a well-coordinated person, more than average, and I think that came through my interest in sports, and athletics ... Playing basketball You have to make decisions promptly, and that's true in the operating room as well. — Denton Cooley

Since I met you, I feel like I can see the operating system of the world- and it is unrequited love. That is why everyone's doing everything. Every book, opera house, moon shot and manifesto is here because someone, somewhere, lit up silent when someone else came into the room, and then quietly burned when they didn't notice them. — Caitlin Moran

I imagined two leather chairs near a fire in a paneled room, where two old soldiers could drink and talk. But she took us into the kitchen. She had put two straight-backed chairs at a kitchen table with a white porcelain top. That table top was screaming with reflected light from a two-hundred-watt bulb overhead. Mary had prepared an operating room. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Another common practice, the reps told us, was to take fancy meals to the entire doctor's office (one of the perks of being a nurse or receptionist, I suppose). One doctor's office even required alternating days of steak and lobster for lunch if the reps wanted access to the doctors. Even more shocking, we found out that physicians sometimes called the reps into the examination room (as an "expert") to directly inform patients about the way certain drugs work. Hearing stories from the reps who sold medical devices was even more disturbing. We learned that it's common practice for device reps to peddle their medical devices in the operating room in real time and while a surgery is under way. Janet and I were surprised at how well the pharmaceutical reps understood classic psychological persuasion strategies and how they employed them in a sophisticated and intuitive manner. — Dan Ariely

In the home we make certain distinctions about functions of rooms and corridors; we do not deliver the groceries straight into the baby's crib. In hospitals we do not take the food trolleys right through the operating chamber, and we rarely have the recreation room next to the convalescent room. We sort out the functions. We have to sort out the functions of the city and the streams of traffic and re-create arterial systems that allow us to breathe ... the shape, pattern and sense of community which you expect if it were a home. — Barbara Ward, Baroness Jackson Of Lodsworth

Had I been allowed to testify, I would have told them that there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the bullet that killed President Kennedy was shot from the grassy knoll area. I would have also informed the Warren Commission about the call I received from Lyndon Johnson while we were operating on Lee Harvey Oswald. President Johnson told me that a man in the operating room would get a deathbed confession from Oswald. — Charles A. Crenshaw

Creativity or talent, like electricity, is something I don't understand but something I'm able to harness and use. While electricity remains a mystery, I know I can plug into it and light up a cathedral or a synagogue or an operating room and use it to help save a life. Or I can use it to electrocute someone. Like electricity, creativity makes no judgment. I can use it productively or destructively. The important thing is to use it. You can't use up creativity. The more you use it, the more you have. — Maya Angelou