The Meaning of Life

These hold some meaning for me, remind me of someone I love, or they're just purely enjoyable. If you can't laugh about it...

Revised Sep 2006

Anesthesia

• Experience is a great thing to have, but you have to suffer a little to get it. Lloyd Carr
• You do best what you do most often.
• It’s hard to kill a spontaneously breathing patient.
• The chief value in adequate physical equipment is not that it makes eternal vigilance unnecessary, but that it makes eternal vigilance effective. [from 1941].
• What's the definition of a good anesthetic? When the patient is more asleep than you are.
• If these monitors are so dependable, what do they need you for?
• Never let ‘em die with just you there.
• Anesthesia is the half-awake, watching the half-asleep being half-murdered by the half-witted.
• Another name for open & close laparotomy? Peek and shriek.
• Epidurals? You go from chewin’ your nails to doin’ your nails.
• Don't go towards the light.
• Yeah, well, just don't make it look like murder.

...and Anesthesia Education

• When I went to graduate school for nurse anesthesia, we were told, “Don’t get married. Don’t get divorced. Keep the distractions to a minimum. Devote yourself to it.” Devote? I wasn’t planning on joining a monastery or nunnery. The church-like mental image I had of Devotion did not seem to match the educational journey I was beginning… After a time, I realized that you can get through it either by casting yourself into it whole-heartedly (devoting yourself to it), or could do just enough to get by, or could even be dragged through kicking and screaming. You got through in each case; but devoting yourself to it was a lot more pleasant. Win, lose, or draw, I slept better at night- knowing there was nothing more I could have done to keep my patients safe.... It can be the worst two years of your life; or you can make it the best two years.
• Work beats talent unless talent works.
• Novices see only what is there; experts see what is not there.
• Just lower the bar enough, they will trip on it and fall forward.
• To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
• When you're in a hole, it's time to stop digging.
• Honesty without compassion is brutality.
• You'll always have trouble with a two-headed dog.
• People judge you not by your abilities, but by your choices.
• Some bridges are pre-burned.
• What makes you think you can't do anything that any human has ever accomplished? Einstein had about 1500 gm of brain tissue, just like you...
• THINK!
• You hate to come, you hate to stay, you hate to leave.
• His greatest strength is his greatest weakness.
• Talk low, talk slow, don’t say too much.
• The essential elements of an anesthesia education are: knowledge, skills, attitude, humbleness, and fright.
• This course is dedicated to the idiotic proposition that you can be taught the fundamentals of Organic chemistry, Inorganic chemistry, Qualitative analysis, Quantitative analysis, Physical chemistry, and Biochemistry all in one semester. The odds against any of you passing this course would be staggering to contemplate if there were any time for contemplation. However, there is not. Get out your notebooks. Max Shulman The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
• It's not his job to remind me, it's my job to remember. Michael Crichton
• It's all hoops-- but in anesthesia school the hoops are smaller, they're made of concertina wire, and they're on fire.
• I'm just walking down the hill slowly...

Life

• There is more to leading than riding in front.
• Why is it that the Southern Ocean leg seems to be your strength? (Paul Cayard, world champion sailor, on racing off Cape Horn in very brutal conditions): It's hard sailing, and you have to want to be there. It's cold, wet, usually windy, and goes on for a long, long time. I get myself in a mental place, which is that I see it as a unique and exceptional opportunity. In this fleet there are 60 or 70 sailors, and of those there are maybe 50 that probably don't enjoy the Southern Ocean. But I take all the negatives of it and put it in a box I call "Unusual Life Experiences", and when I'm 70 I'll remember the exceptional things I did in my life, and not the standard deal. When I'm there, I'm mentally in a place where I relish the opportunity to go down there and love it and compete hard. There's also age and experience... When life's easy anyone can drive, but when it's tough, the people who excel can make a difference.
• I've learned that regardless of your relationship with your parents, you'll miss them when they're gone from your life... Maya Angelou
• I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel...Maya Angelou
• Out there on the ice? That's no place for a nervous person… Mickey Redmond
• ...Try being the football coach at Michigan in mid-August, when the temperatures regularly hit 90 degrees, and the players are practicing twice a day instead of hitting the beach with other guys their age. Try making them smile then. During just such a day, Lloyd Carr won over these Wolverines with some Popsicles and what has become a buzz phrase to every player. “We were all dying out there, said center Rod Payne. ”Coach Carr blows the whistle and waves his hand for us to run over. A dune buggy full of Popsicles drives up, and they hand them out. Lloyd looks at us and has that smile on his face, and says, ‘Where else would you rather be?’ “
• Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
• You never know who is going to give you your last drink of water.
• Hooray, hooray, it's the first of May. Outdoor "funning" begins today.
• The best way to predict the future is to invent it. AK Morrison
• If you are going in the wrong direction, you can't get to where you want to go by running faster.
• If you do things the way you always have, you get the results you always have.
• You always need a good red nail polish.
• Youth is wasted on the young.
• You can’t make chicken soup out of chicken shit.
• Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain. -Goethe
• Being typecast as Colombo? ... Well, it ain’t cancer. Peter Falk
• You play with a puppy, he’ll lick you in the face.
• Dead people don't have trouble juggling their schedules.
• It is not the critic who counts nor the man who points out how the strong men stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. -Teddy Roosevelt
• Pericles, reflecting on the glory of Athens 2,500 years ago, "What made her great was men with the spirit of adventure. Men who knew their duty. Men who were ashamed to fall below a certain standard. They gave to her their lives, to all of us for their own selves. They won prizes that never grow old."

...Taking care of yourself

• If you remember how to do a neuro check, you don’t need a neuro check.
• You’re digging your grave with your teeth.

...Parables

• A little girl was walking in the winter and saw a frozen snake by the side of the road. She took pity on it, and put it in her pocket to warm it up. After a while, the snake warmed up, and bit her in the leg. She said, "Hey, I took care of you, what did you bite me for?" And the snake said, "Well, you knew I was a snake when you picked me up, didn’t you?"

...Work

• BullPuckey Bingo
• You’d sooner work for Lucifer than him!
• Sarcasm is just one more service we offer.

...Maturity

• Who of us is mature enough for offspring before the offspring themselves arrive? The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults. Peter De Vries
• In our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God. Aeschylus
• It is more shameful to mistrust one's friends than to be deceived by them.

Math and statistics

• If you can't prove what you want to prove, demonstrate something else and pretend they are the same thing. In the daze that follows the collision of statistics with the human mind, hardly anybody will notice the difference. - Darrell Huff, 1954
• "I only took the regular course"
  "What was that?" inquired Alice.
  "Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with," the Mock Turtle replied; "and then the different branches of Arithmetic- Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision." -Lewis Carroll Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
• There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. Disraeli
• There is terror in numbers. Darrell Huff
• First get your data- you can distort it later. Mark Twain
• Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true. Bertrand Russell
• Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
• A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. Josef Stalin

Yogi Berra

• Don’t you know anything? "I don’t even suspect anything"
• If fans don’t want to come out to the ball game, nobody’s going to stop them.
• 90% of hitting is mental, the other half is physical.
• It ain’t over till it’s over.
• I really didn’t say half the things I’ve said.
• The future ain’t what it used to be.
• You can see a lot just by looking.
• Naah, that's gettin' so popular, nobody goes there anymore.