Operating Room Quotes

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

Jobs, Heart, Guy

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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

Sea, Miracle, Rooms

Mitch Albom (2013). “The First Phone Call From Heaven: A Novel”, p.13, Harper Collins

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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.

Benjamin Carson

Play, Giving, Risk

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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

Would Be, Done, Might

"Take the Risk: Learning to Identify, Choose, and Live with Acceptable Risk". Book by Ben Carson and Gregg Lewis, 2008.

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Some people think that doctors and nurses can put scrambled eggs back into the shell.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Nursing, Thinking, Eggs

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You can’t bake a cake without getting the kitchen messy. Halfway through surgery it looks like there’s been a murder in the operating room. If you send a rocket to the moon, about ninety percent of the time it’s off course—it ‘fails’ its way to the moon by continually making mistakes and correcting them.

Price Pritchett

Mistake, Moon, Cake

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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

Science, Errors, Giants

"A Conversation With: Joseph E. Murray; On Surgical Innovation And The Questions It Can Raise". Interview With Cornelia Dean, www.nytimes.com. September 25, 2001.

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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

Horror Stories, Errors, Identity

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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

Basketball, Sports, Thinking

"Presidential Medal of Freedom". Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. April 11, 1991.

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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

Creativity, Light, Important

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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

Funny, Humor, Rooms

"Bill Engvall: Aged & Confused". Comedy/ TV Special, www.imdb.com. 2009.

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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. And you say - 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.

Benjamin Carson

Race, Npr, Skins

Source: www.cbsnews.com

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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

Heart, Sleep, Animal

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I was especially impressed with Pauley Pavilion [at UCLA campus ]. The floors hadn't been laid down yet, when they gave me the tour, each new room got my heart thumping. They even had a surgical operating room in case an athlete was severely injured.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Heart, Athlete, Ucla

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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

Hands, Feet, Brain

Source: www.pbs.org

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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

Heart, Successful, Impact

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