Oliver Sacks writes about Spalding Gray's brain injury and suicide.

Gray was in a car accident, in 2001, that drove bone fragments into his right frontal lobe and, it seems, changed him profoundly:

It was while he was in the hospital in Ireland following his hip surgery, he told me, that he finalized a deal to sell the old house. He later came to feel that he was �not himself� at the time, that �witches, ghosts, and voodoo� had �commanded� him to do it....

Three years later, he was still obsessing about selling the house. Asked if he had other recurrent thoughts:

He said yes: he often thought about his mother and the first twenty-six years of his life. It was when he was twenty-six that his mother, who had been intermittently psychotic since he was ten, fell into a self-torturing, remorseful state, focussed on the selling of her family house. Unable to endure her torment, she had committed suicide....

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A nurse said: "We all play a game called Interesting Things I Have Found in Obese People�s Rolls of Fat."

"So far I�m sitting in third with a fork, second place is an ICU nurse who found a TV remote, and the winner is an ER nurse who found a tuna fish sandwich."

Quoted in a WaPo article called "Nurses make fun of their dying patients. That�s okay," by Alexandra Robbins, who has a book called, "The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles With the Heroes of the Hospital."

Robbins says:

I learned that some units have a dedicated �butt box� for items retrieved from patients� rectums � glass perfume bottles, an entire apple, etc. � though after Indiana nurses pulled out a G.I. Joe, the real unfortunate hero assumed pride of place in the nurses� station.

Her point is that usually the jokes are about "situations and symptoms"...

But even when patients do become subjects of derogatory humor, we shouldn�t rush to criticize medical professionals for using it. Bioethicist Katie Watson suggests that kind of humor may result when health-care providers feel powerless to heal. �Derisive joking does the unspoken work of reframing physicians as blameless for their inability to help,� she wrote in 2011 in the Hastings Center Report....

Humor has a place in hospitals, even if it�s dark, even if it�s derogatory � as long as it isn�t cruel.... Humor is a way for nurses to empower themselves and to unite with one another, determined and defiant, against disease and injury...

... and rolls of fat.

"On day ten, I turned a corner� I felt awful, as usual, in the morning, but a completely different person in the afternoon."

"This was delightful, and wholly unexpected: there was no intimation, beforehand, that such a transformation was about to happen," writes Oliver Sacks, describing the aftermath of treatment for metastatic liver cancer.

How much of this was a reestablishment of balance in the body; how much an autonomic rebound after a profound autonomic depression; how much other physiological factors; and how much the sheer joy of writing, I do not know. But my transformed state and feeling were, I suspect, very close to what Nietzsche experienced after a period of illness and expressed so lyrically in The Gay Science:

Gratitude pours forth continually, as if the unexpected had just happened � the gratitude of a convalescent � for convalescence was unexpected�. The rejoicing of strength that is returning, of a reawakened faith in a tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, of a sudden sense and anticipation of a future, of impending adventures, of seas that are open again.

Prepare to become adequately informed.

"Patients are not adequately informed about the burdens. All they�re told is, �You have to go on dialysis or you�ll die,�... Nobody tells them, �You could have up to two years without the treatment, without the discomfort, with greater independence.��

Said Dr. Alvin H. Moss, chairman of the Coalition for Supportive Care of Kidney Patients, quoted in "Learning to Say No to Dialysis."

Do older people with advancing kidney disease really intend to sign up for all this? If they hope to reach a particular milestone � a great-grandchild�s birth, say � or value survival above all, perhaps so. But many express ambivalence....

[O]lder patients may not fully grasp what lies ahead. When they decide to discontinue dialysis, Dr. Moss said, �patients say to me, �Doc, it�s not that I want to die, but I don�t want to keep living like this.��

Oh, you "older people," you need to learn... and the death panel coalition is here to propagandize adequately inform you.

"The U.S. military is studying the woman who received a federally funded face transplant after she was attacked by a rampaging chimpanzee..."

"... hoping the findings help seriously disfigured soldiers returning from war."

The Pentagon paid for Charla Nash�s full face transplant in 2011 � two years after she was horribly disfigured by a chimp attack � and is underwriting her follow-up treatment at a combined cost estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars....

Nash jokes about sometimes feeling like a science project. But the 61-year-old daughter of an Air Force veteran said she gets real satisfaction out of letting the doctors use her for research, and sees it as an opportunity to help wounded soldiers and "do something good out of all of this bad."

"They asked me, could they? I said, 'Yeah, I'd be thrilled to help out in any way I could,'" said Nash, a former Connecticut resident who now lives on her own in Boston with the help of part-time aides.

Good for her. I'm impressed by her spirit. She looks great in the first picture you see. Her face looks mobile and expressive. Be careful scrolling past the first screen, because there are pre-transplant pictures of Ms. Nash. The chimp attack blinded her, so she has never seen the damage or the vast improvement. Her fight to inhabit a new face is rewarded not by looking in a mirror but by how the face feels from the inside, her relationships with other people, and the knowledge that she is contributing to the treatment of others who are suffering and who will suffer.