Mom and Dad were married 64 years. And if you wondered what their secret was, you could have asked the local florist - because every day Dad gave Mom a rose, which he put on her bedside table. That's how she found out what happened on the day my father died - she went looking for him because that morning, there was no rose.
I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient whose care I am taking over is not by staring at the computer screen but by going to see the patient; it's only at the bedside that I can figure out what is important.
I have an obligation to use what I know to try to bring real, usable medical science to every doctor and bedside and patient.
I attended the bedside of a friend who was dying in a Dublin hospital. She lived her last hours in a public ward with a television blaring out a football match, all but drowning our final conversation.
I'm not lonely, and I think that has a lot to do with what's on my bedside table rather than what's in my bed.
I sleep with my gun on my bedside table. I live alone; it is my protection and makes me feel safer.
Bedside manners are no substitute for the right diagnosis.
I write everything down. I e-mail the second I think of something, or I write notes in my BlackBerry calendar. I set up reminder alerts on my phone. And I have a notebook by my bedside so I can write down any last-minute ideas.
I always have several books on the go at any one moment, so it's no good you asking 'What's on the bedside table at the moment, Emma?' because often I can't even see the table!
One of the maddening ironies of writing books is that it leaves so little time for reading others'. My bedside is piled with books, but it's duty reading: books for book research, books for review. The ones I pine for are off on a shelf downstairs.