Medical Biography

A compilation of the best ER stories that have happened to me. They are all completely true. People always want to hear "nurse stories" and I think that these stories are what they want to hear. You can bet on a lot of raised eyebrows while listening to this! These can invoke powerful emotions and give a glimpse into healthcare and show how some people really are.

Nine million Americans are touched by aneurysms during their lifetimes. This is one story of love. Brainstorm is the candid and powerful memoir of the author's harrowing experience of an aneurysm and his road to recovery. It is a journey of love and devotion and a clash of medical beliefs and countercultures.

Non, un médecin légiste n'est pas – seulement – cet homme en blouse blanche, plongeant dans les entrailles du corps humain, le disséquant, le découpant de part en part pour en extirper les derniers secrets. Un légiste est aussi un enquêteur des plus redoutables, capable au premier coup d'œil, dès la scène de crime, de confondre un assassin, de débusquer le meurtre quand on crie au suicide, de reconstituer le scénario d'une tragédie sanglante, capable encore, sans dégainer son scalpel, de repérer l'enfant ou la femme maltraités, abusés.

Lisa Ray is one of India's first supermodels. She's also an actor, a cancer survivor, a mother of twins through surrogacy. She is a woman who has lived many lives. And this is her story. Close to the Bone is an unflinching, deeply moving account of Lisa Ray's life, tracing her childhood in Canada as the biracial daughter of an Indian man and a Polish woman, her rise as a popular Bollywood star, and her battle with a rare, incurable cancer.

The Aging Revolution is the story of Butler and his disciples: women and men who saw older distressed adults in hospitals and homes, and worse: being ignored by most of the medical establishment. These revolutionaries could not ignore the suffering, and they set out—individually and collectively—to create entirely new ways of caring for aging adults to ease their suffering and improve their quality and length of life.

In “Lung Cancer Free” Dr. Lori Friesen and Keith Zafren share their journey from the shock of her husband’s initial diagnosis, through surgery and chemo, to the point where he was dying, being sustained on supplemental oxygen just to keep breathing, to where they are today: Keith is alive, breathing easily and freely with beautiful, healthy lungs.

On the morning of December 22, 2005, New York City firefighter Matt Long was cycling to work when he was struck by and sucked under a 20-ton bus making an illegal turn. The injuries he sustained pushed him within inches of death. Miraculously, after five months in the hospital and more than 40 operations, Matt was able to start his recovery. This book chronicles Matt's road to recovery as he teaches himself to walk again and, a mere three years later, to run in the 2008 New York City Marathon.

Cory Friedman woke up one morning when he was five years old with the uncontrollable urge to twitch his neck. From that day forward his life became a hell of irrepressible tics and involuntary utterances, and Cory embarked on an excruciating journey from specialist to specialist to discover the cause of his disease. Soon it became unclear what tics were symptoms of his disease and what were side effects of the countless combinations of drugs. The only certainty is that it kept getting worse. Simply put: Cory Friedman's life was a living hell.

More than four hundred abandoned suitcases filled with patients’ belongings were found when Willard Psychiatric Center closed in 1995 after 125 years of operation. They are skillfully examined here and compared to the written record to create a moving—and devastating—group portrait of twentieth-century American psychiatric care.

Most would not expect a book about a stroke to be entertaining, but this memoir will force you to laugh through a tragedy, then cry, then laugh again. Avrel Seale was fifty, did not smoke or drink, had low blood pressure, and had hiked more than two hundred miles the year a stroke nearly ended his life. In an instant, he was teleported into the body of an old man—unbalanced, shaky, spastic, and half-paralyzed. Overnight, he was plunged into a world of brain surgeons, nurses, insurance case managers, and an abundance of therapists.

The technology invented by psychiatrist Robert G. Heath at Tulane University in 1950s and 60s has been described as one of "the most controversial yet largely undocumented experiments in US history" - controversial to us because Heath's patients included incarcerated convicts and gay men to be 'cured' of their sexual preference; controversial in its day because his work was allegedly part of MKUltra, the CIA's notorious "mind control" project. As a result, Heath's cutting-edge research and legacy were put under lock and key, buried in Tulane's archives.

Switching Time is the first story centering on multiple personality disorder to be told by the treating physician. It is the incredible saga of a young woman stranded in unimaginable darkness who, in order to survive, created 17 different versions of herself. One by one, Karen's "alters" began showing themselves: men, women, young boys, a toddler, black, white, vicious, nurturing, prim, licentious. And their "stepping out" confronted Baer with the challenge of a lifetime.

After knowing friends with anorexia and being baffled by their behavior, Laura Moisin suddenly found herself prone to the same disease - not eating at all and going weeks at a time consuming nothing but water and the occasional black coffee. Deceiving therapists by misleading them with symptoms of depression, her anorexia is prolonged, and her health deteriorates rapidly.

Over the next ten years, 40 to 60 million people in this country will be admitted to the ICU. Most of these hospitalizations will be sudden, unexpected, and harrowing experiences that can alter patients and their families physically and emotionally, with effects that endure for years. In this rich blend of science, medical history, profoundly humane patient stories, and personal reflection, Dr. Wes Ely describes his mission to prevent patients from being inadvertently harmed by the technology that is keeping them alive.

In her former career as an English professor, Theresa Brown had been shielded from the harsh reality of death. That all changed the day she decided to become an oncology nurse. In Critical Care, Theresa writes powerfully and honestly about her first year on the hospital floor. With great compassion and a disarming sense of humor, she shares the trials and triumphs of her patients and comes to realize that caring for a patient means much more than simply treating a disease.

Essai, récit, exercice de réflexion, ce travail journalistique minutieusement documenté aborde la question du cancer à travers l’expérience personnelle de Josée Blanchette et les témoignages qu’elle a reçus. Cette enquête sur un sujet majeur donne la parole à de nombreux spécialistes, lucides et parfois critiques. L’autrice remet en question les accointances entre l’oncologie et les compagnies pharmaceutiques, effectue une incursion en médecine intégrative, et propose des pistes de prévention et de postvention.

Freedom 55? The so-called “Golden Years”? What if you are slowly losing your memories and your motor skills? Or what if you are the devastated witness as your partner struggles with dementia? Lewy Body Disease is a form of dementia second only to Alzheimer’s in numbers, yet many doctors and almost no lay people have ever heard its name. This is the story of two courageous people, Julie and Ken Sobol, life partners as well as writing partners. Caught up in the frightening and fatal fog of Lewy Body Disease, they started writing this book together.

Death was conspicuously absent during Rachel's medical training. Instead, her education focused entirely on learning to save lives, and was left wanting when it came to helping patients and their families face death. She came to specialize in palliative medicine because it is the one specialty in which the quality, not quantity of life truly matters. In the same year she started to work in a hospice, Rachel was forced to face tragedy in her own life when her father was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

In the quarter century that Victoria Sweet has been a doctor, "health care" has replaced medicine, "providers" (vastly outnumbered by administrators) look at their laptops more than at their patients, and the ruthless pursuit of efficiency has vanquished not only trust and intimacy but also, often, the effectiveness of treatment. Victoria Sweet knows that there is an alternative way, because she has lived and practiced it. In her new book, she reflects with compassion, wit, and profound insight.

This is the very raw story of a man who served his country, fought in the Falklands, and then, had extreme difficulty adjusting after the war. But it is actually much more than that. Yes, like many veterans of combat he fought - and continues to fight - with post-traumatic stress disorder. However, the factors leading to his PTSD began long before he ever put on his uniform and picked up a gun.