And In Stories, Endings Matter.

The Definition Of What It Means To Be Dying Has Changed Radically. We Are Able To Extend People's Lives Considerably, Including Sometimes, Good Days.

One Of The Consequences Of If The Affordable Care Act Is Repealed, Is That All Of Us Now Are At Risk Of Being A Preexisting - Of Having A Preexisting Condition Waiting To Happen. Life, Increasingly, Is A Preexisting Condition Waiting To Happen, Now That We Have More And More Of This Data Available.

The Possibilities And Probabilities Are All We Have To Work With In Medicine, Though. What We Are Drawn To In This Imperfect Science, What We In Fact Covet In Our Way, Is The Alterable Moment-the Fragile But Crystalline Opportunity For One's Know-how, Ability, Or Just Gut Instinct To Change The Course Of Another's Life For The Better.

We Look For Medicine To Be An Orderly Field Of Knowledge And Procedure. But It Is Not. It Is An Imperfect Science, An Enterprise Of Constantly Changing Knowledge, Uncertain Information, Fallible Individuals, And At The Same Time Lives On The Line. There Is Science In What We Do, Yes, But Also Habit, Intuition, And Sometimes Plain Old Guessing. The Gap Between What We Know And What We Aim For Persists. And This Gap Complicates Everything We Do.

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.