I was injured by an enemy hand grenade in Afghanistan in 2010. I spent three years recovering at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center… And through that three years, I was forced to search for the silver linings during the long dark and painful nights and days in the hospital.
This is a really big space station. We do a lot of various kinds of work here, different kinds of science experiments; we have over 400 different experiments going on at any one time in different areas, from basic science research to medical technology, that hopefully will benefit more people on Earth.
At one point, I had over 800 employees, and I always paid all health care for my people – including a man who was my assistant who got HIV. I wound up paying his medical bills, which went into the hundreds of thousands. I’m not making myself out to be a saint. I did the right thing.
I treat my writing like a day job, like my main job, even if for many years I was doing other jobs to pay the bills. I worked as a copy editor. I was a medical guinea pig. I was an eBay power seller of ladies’ handbags. I was an assistant to a bookie at the horse races. I bartended. I did anything I could to make ends meet.
I got into medical school at the University of California in San Francisco and did well. A lot of smart kids in medical school, and believe me, I wasn’t not nearly the smartest one, but I was the most focused and the happiest kid in medical school. In 1979, I graduated as the valedictorian and was honored with the Gold Cane Award.
Here in Silicon Valley, I have taken part in hundreds of conversations trying to convince people to dive in and become entrepreneurs. All too often, innovators with good, safe, jobs are unwilling to put their family’s access to health care at risk by walking away from company-backed medical insurance.
My parents were educated in the Turkish system and went straight from high school to medical school; my mom, who had skipped a grade, was dissecting corpses at age seventeen. Growing up in America, I think I envied my parents’ education. By comparison, everything I did in school seemed so sort of low-stakes and infantilizing.
I had this ‘War and Peace’ thing of wanting to experience war as a kind of incredible human enterprise. I even applied to Officer Candidate School. Then the practical side of me kicked in and I thought, ‘I really don’t want to get drafted.’ So I went down to the physical and checked every psychological disorder and drug on the medical history form.
What if in a permission-based structure, you could decide if you wanted to provide value to advertisers or to political groups? Or, for instance, share your medical data for cancer research? All those options should be available for an individual to make.
Today, all patients accepted for treatment at St. Jude’s are treated without regard for the family’s ability to pay. Everything beyond what is covered by insurance is taken care of, and for those without insurance, all of the medical costs are absorbed by the hospital.
I’ve always been very interested in the question of how computation can fundamentally advance the things that we can see. This led me to have a fascination with medical imaging, especially things like MRI and scanning, and eventually computer graphics.
I don’t trust news sources, and neither should other people. They should use them in the same way that they use medical opinions and get more than one on the important issues. Trust is the most precious thing you could possibly give to another person. But to institutions? Publications?
I can say, ‘Well, I’m a male. I’m a male human. I’m a medical doctor. I’m an author…’ If I go to a religious point of view, I will say, ‘I am a soul. I am a spirit.’ If I go into science, I will say, ‘I am energy. I am light.’ But the truth is I have no idea what I am.
Sometime they don’t let you know that they know that they don’t know everything, but the core of the medical approach is that you try to identify pathologies, which are subsystems within the human body or the larger system that are having undesirable consequences.
I don’t practice, but I am still officially in paediatrics. I keep in touch with journals, and I have a very good data bank of medical information and there is a key thing for a writer knowing where to go. I know where to go to get the information that I need.
That’s the thing. in medicine, you’re used to saying there’s a problem within the person, and saying there’s a problem within the culture, that’s not a medical answer. Medicine has to look in one direction, so there’s only one type of answer that they can find.
Just the actual physical ability to hold four instruments simultaneously and do some of the things that Vivien was able to do is mind blowing to any surgeon. He never went to medical school and he became one of the great teachers of medicine himself, people are just amazed.
The Navy’s paid for you to go through school, and then they need doctors to go out and take care of people who are in various different parts of the world. I decided to pay back my time first as an undersea medical officer. I was stationed in Scotland.
Over 120 Aboriginal communities run their own health services – some have been doing so for 30 years. They struggle with difficult medical problems. They also try to deal with counselling, stolen generations issues, family relationships, violence, suicide prevention.
Another cause of change, one less noticeable but fundamental, is the modern growth of population closely connected with scientific and medical discoveries. It is interesting that the United Nations has set up a special Commission to study this question.
My diminished girth, in tailor phraseology, was hardly conceivable even by my own friends, or my respected medical adviser, until I put on my former clothing, over what I now wear, which is a thoroughly convincing proof of the remarkable change.
If one of us, any of us, any American is traveling in a town somewhere in America and a medical crisis hits them, for someone who is diabetic or perhaps has heart disease or some other problems, where do we get the records to determine what to do?
But I spent just two calendar years at Cornell University, though it was covering more than three years of work, and then went to medical school and did become interested in psychiatry, and even helped form a kind of psychiatry club in medical school.
And it was back in the mid-1980s, and as I point out in a piece, that was when we are spending about eight percent of our gross domestic product on health care. And even then, we had the impression that so much of the excessive, aggressive medical treatment that took place at the end of life was not only unnecessary but it was cruel.
We can’t get to the $4 trillion in savings that we need by just cutting the 12 percent of the budget that pays for things like medical research and education funding and food inspectors and the weather service. And we can’t just do it by making seniors pay more for Medicare.
