Icu Quotes

Hospitals strip a lot from you - your independence, your confidence, sometimes your will to live. But pettiness too. Pettiness is the first casualty of the ICU waiting room. No one has the energy for it. ~ Dennis Lehane

Just before you went into the ICU, I started to feel this ache in my hip." "No," I said. Panic rolled in, pulled me under. He nodded. "So I went in for a PET scan." He stopped. He yanked the cigarette out of his mouth and clenched his teeth. Much of my life had been devoted to trying not to cry in front of people who loved me, so I knew what Augustus was doing. You clench your teeth. You look up. You tell yourself that if they see you cry, it will hurt them, and you will be nothing but A Sadness in their lives, and you must not become a mere sadness, so you will not cry, and you say all of this to yourself while looking up at the ceiling, and then you swallow even though your throat does not want to close and you look at the person who loves you and smile. He flashed his crooked smile, then said, "I lit up like a Christmas tree, Hazel Grace. The lining of my chest, my left hip, my liver, everywhere. ~ John Green

Money spent on vegetative patients is money not spent on preventive care, such as flu shots and mammograms. Each night in an ICU bed for such patients is a night that another patient with a genuine prognosis for recovery is denied such high-end care. Every dollar exhausted on patients who will never wake up again is a dollar not devoted to finding a cure for cancer. ~ Jacob M. Appel

The hospital will never be healthy for patients if it's not a healthy environment for nurses, where their voices are heard and where they can care for their patients and use the full extent of their knowledge, abilities, and skills. After all, hospitals today have become one big intensive care unit: all patients need intensive caring. ~ Tilda Shalof

Go get your gun because God won't show.
He sent a poet instead.
The Don Quixote of the ICU. Quite impressive for a cripple. Munchhausen by proxy of a muse.
Tempt not a desperate man. This split lip is for you. I traded it for an outdated tooth. ~ Keith Buckley

I liked it all, but most of all I liked the fact that although the play was entirely focused on Quintana there were, five evenings and two afternoons a week, these ninety full minutes, the run time of the play, during which she did not need to be dead.
During which the question remained open.
During which the denouement had yet to play out.
During which the last scene played did not necessarily need to be played in the ICU overlooking the East River.
During which the bells would not necessarily sound and the doors would not necessarily be locked at six.
During which the last dialogue heard did not necessarily need to concern the vent.
Like when someone dies, don't dwell on it. ~ Joan Didion

Gate C22

At gate C22 in the Portland airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after
the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like he'd just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
like she'd been released at last from ICU, snapped
out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.

Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
kisses like the ocean in the early morning,
the way it gathers and swells, sucking
each rock under, swallowing it
again and again. We were all watching–
passengers waiting for the delayed flight
to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,
the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling
sunglasses. We couldn't look away. We could
taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.

But the best part was his face. When he drew back
and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
as though he were a mother still open from giving birth,
as your mother must have looked at you, no matter
what happened after–if she beat you or left you ~ Ellen Bass

He eased the door open, scanned right and left, then slid into the corridor and into the room across it. Machines beeped and hummed, monitoring whatever poor bastard lay in the bed. Staying out of the range of the camera, he slithered against the wall until he could aim the jammer he carried. Even as the alarm sounded he was out and into the next room before the ICU team came running. He repeated the process, grinning as the medicals ran by. He hit a third for good measure, then made the dash to 8-C. By the time they determined it was an electronic glitch, rebooted, did whatever they did for the poor bastards in beds, he'd have done what he'd come to do and be gone. He moved into 8-C. They kept the lights dim, he noted. Rest and quiet was the order of the day. Well, she'd get plenty of both where he was sending her. He moved to the bed, pulled out the vial in his pocket. Should've kept your nose out of our business, stupid bitch. ~ J.D. Robb

As Christians, if sin were the reason for our afflictions, then we should all be in ICU"

~ R. Alan Woods [2012] ~ R. Alan Woods

Jesse stirs again. This time his fingers twitch. As much as I want to see him open his eyes, I can't be here for that. It'll make leaving him too hard. I turn toward the doorway and I'm outside in the main room of the ICU when I hear his weakened voice say, "Winter?"

I hurry back to the waiting area. Hopefully he'll think he dreamed me. Maybe he did. Sometimes I feel like I'm not even real anymore ~ Paula Stokes

Mom once snuck me into a casino. We were going on vacation to Crater Lake and we stopped at a resort on an Indian reservation for the buffet lunch. Mom decided to do a bit of gambling, and I went with her while Dad stayed with Teddy, who was napping in his stroller. Mom sat down at the dollar blackjack tables. The dealer looked at me, then at Mom, who returned his mildly suspicious glance with a look sharp enough to cut diamonds followed by a smile more brilliant that any gem. The dealer sheepishly smiled back and didn't say a word. I watched Mom play, mesmerized. It seemed like we were in there for fifteen minutes but then Dad and Teddy came in search of us, both of them grumpy. It turned out we'd been there for over an hour. The ICU is like that. ~ Gayle Forman

Her brain was acutely damaged in the accident.

When the doctor was coming out of the ICU, he feared.
He made an evil prayer.

"I am fine to live with her memories,
I will settle myself with the very
thought that she isn't anymore, happily and gently.

But dear God,
don't make her lose her conscious,
like a dead yet, living body.
Coldness in the eyes,
which I have seen filled with love and surprise
will kill me every day.

I don't want to die a new death every minute.
Take her away,
Or give her back in whole. ~ Jasleen Kaur Gumber

I had actually hurt my neck, and because I went a while without getting it taken care of - it was pushing up against the back of my heart - and because I have heart issues, they thought it was this whole big deal. So I spent a good three days in the hospital, two nights in the ICU. ~ Austin Carlile

The blue eyes watched the Texan as his python skin boots took him into the dimness of the hall of doors and his escape from Corazon's ICU was a clip clopping stride of broken confidence caught in the rebellious lighting of a cigarette. ~ Luke Taylor

Nearly everyone who is asked where they want to spend their final days says at home, surrounded by people they love and who love them. That's the consistent finding of surveys and, in my experience as a doctor, remains true when people become patients. Unfortunately, it's not the way things turn out. At present, just over one-fifth of Americans are at home when they die. Over 30 percent die in nursing homes, where, according to polls, virtually no one says they want to be. Hospitals remain the site of over 50 percent of deaths in most parts of the country, and nearly 40 percent of people who die in a hospital spend their last days in ICU, where they will likely be sedated or have their arms tied down so they will not pull out breathing tubes, intravenous lines, or catheters. Dying is hard, but it doesn't have to be this hard. ~ Ira Byock

One study concluded that there were 1.7 errors per patient per day in America's ICUs. Of these errors, 29 percent could have caused clinically significant harm or death. Given that the average ICU length of stay is three days, this research suggests that nearly all patients hospitalized in the ICU sustain a potentially life-threatening mistake at some point during their stay. ~ Peter Pronovost

Augustus Waters died eight days after his prefuneral, at Memorial, in the ICU, when the cancer, which was made of him, finally stopped his heart, which was also made of him. ~ John Green

So how to combine a liter of fluid with active agents, customized according to the patient's weight and status, while keeping everything sterile? If this is for the ER or the ICU, we have about ten minutes to make it happen. Fortunately for the patient, there is a sleep-starved teenager apprenticed to a chain-smoking barmaid in the basement who is ready for action. *** ~ Hope Jahren