Medical Diseases

In March 2017 Linda Nolan was diagnosed with secondary breast cancer and was given the terrible news that it was not curable, though it was treatable. Her first thought was to worry about her family, still grieving the loss of their sister Bernie just a few years earlier. Her second was to think, But I'm alive, and I'm going to fight it.

Robert McCrum was 42 when he suffered a massive stroke which left one side of his body paralysed, his speech drastically impaired and his sense of himself radically altered. My Year Off traces McCrum's gruelling recovery as he regains sensation and begins to come to terms, with the help of his family, with what can and cannot be recovered after a grave injury. It is a moving remonstrance against human frailty and a vital and insightful exploration of hope, despair, determination and, ultimately, love.

The End of Miracles is a twisting, haunting story about the drastic consequences of a frustrated obsession. A woman with a complex past wants nothing more than to become a mother, but struggles with infertility and miscarriage. She is temporarily comforted by a wish-fulfilling false pregnancy, but when reality inevitably dashes that fantasy, she falls into a depression so deep she must be hospitalized.

Danny Baker is a national treasure with a well-documented and colourful life. For over a quarter of a century, he has amused and entertained audiences on both radio and television. Beginning his career at the age of 15 in a small record shop in London's West End, Danny went on to become an acclaimed music journalist and started his radio career on BBC GLR in 1989. With a unique take on life and a lot to say, Danny's latest book is full of his trademark warmth, wit and insight.

Renowned as a BBC journalist, Victoria Derbyshire has spent 20 years finding the human story behind the headlines. In 2015 she was diagnosed with breast cancer. With honesty and openness, she decided to live out her treatment and recovery in the spotlight in a series of video diaries. Victoria has kept a diary since she was nine years old, and in Dear Cancer, Love Victoria she shares her day-to-day experiences of life following diagnosis and coming to terms with a future that wasn't planned.

When Joselin Linder was in her 20s, her legs started to swell. She thought little of it until her health problems started to compound in ways that baffled her doctors. Diagnosed with extreme liver blockage and dangerous levels of lymph fluid, Joselin turned to the most similar case she could think of - her father's.

In Mercies in Disguise, acclaimed New York Times reporter and best-selling author Gina Kolata tells the story of the Baxleys, an upstanding family in small-town South Carolina. Many of them were doctors, but still, they are struck down by an inscrutable illness. Finally they discover the cause of the disease after a remarkable sequence of providential events. Meanwhile science, progressing for 50 years along a parallel track, handed the Baxleys a question - not a cure but a blood test that would reveal who had the gene for the disease.

Matt Woodcock's frank, funny real-life diaries reveal what it was like for him to train as a vicar while struggling against all odds to become a father. In them he lays bare his joys and struggles as he attempts to reconcile his calling as a vicar with his life as a party-loving journalist, footie-freak, and incorrigible extrovert.

The controversial Emanuel Revici, M.D., made the bones grow back in cancer patients, and restored health to AIDS patients as well as drug addicts and alcoholics. His medicines lifted debilitating migraines in as little as three minutes. Revici's reward? He was attacked and ostracized by the best. JAMA published false reports about his work. The American Cancer Society blasted him time and again. Meanwhile, word of mouth brought new patients to see him for decades.

The Last Ocean is Gerrard’s investigation into what dementia does to both the person who lives with the condition and to their caregivers. Dementia is now one of the leading causes of death in the West, and this necessary book will offer both comfort and a map to those walking through it. While she begins with her father’s long slip into forgetting, Gerrard expands to examine dementia writ large. Gerrard gives raw but literary shape both to the unimaginable loss of one’s own faculties, as well as to the pain of their loved ones.

Straight out of today’s hospitals and labs–and tomorrow’s headlines–comes a frightening, scalpel-sharp thriller from medical insider Joshua Spanogle. In an astounding debut, Spanogle takes us on an all-too-real race against time…as a young doctor enters the dark side of scientific research, desperate to stop a terrifying epidemic before it is too late….

At 49 years old, Carol Clupny was an active, driven woman with a career, a family, and a zest for adventure. A mere year later, she struggles with strange symptoms of internal tremors, frozen shoulders, and a serious intestinal infection. She doesn’t understand why she can’t paddle a kayak or throw the ball for her dogs. Then comes the diagnosis: early onset Parkinson’s Disease. Carol is not afraid to face the apathy and depression. Instead of being drug down into darkness, she finds strategies for lifting herself, and others around her, up into the light.

After a fifteen-year search, the author found a doctor whose elimination diet relieved her brain fog. This enabled her to complete her self-study and to construct an actionable new diagnosis: chronic ambient poisoning. Unseen by doctors and obscured by a myriad of false diagnoses, chronic ambient poisoning defies late modern, fragmented, accuracy-challenged medical systems. It also reveals that human-caused habitat injuries that afflict birds, bees, and other species are also affecting humans while driving evolved life toward death as asteroid strikes have done in the past.

Nicky, a witty, intelligent, and clever 13-year-old, was diagnosed with a rare childhood bone cancer. However, this book is about more than cancer and its treatment and the fight to survive. It's about more than a mother and her son who accepted his mortality at such a young age and the strength and love between two loving souls.

For the first time, journalist and historian David Talbot turns inward in this intimate journey through the life-changing year following his stroke, a year that turned his life upside down, and ultimately, saved him. In his signature voice and with powerful storytelling, Talbot examines the physical, emotional, and psychological impact his stroke has had on his identity. Along the way Talbot offers listeners insider stories on the wild early days of internet journalism, insights into the new tech culture, the down and dirty of Hollywood, and much more.

In the fall of 1988, Sue Miller found herself caring for her father as he slipped into the grasp of Alzheimer's disease. She was, she claims, perhaps the least constitutionally suited of all her siblings to be in the role in which she suddenly found herself, and in The Story of My Father she grapples with the haunting memories of those final months and the larger narrative of her father's life.

Lopsided is not your ordinary cancer memoir. Meredith Norton displays the razor-sharp wit of a master humorist as she chronicles her experience, from the first appearance of her bizarre symptoms to moving in with her compulsive parents and their five television sets.

Pro football Hall of Famer Jim Kelly and his wife, Jill, were catapulted from a seemingly fairy-tale life of celebrity into a world of private struggle and medical uncertainty. What the public didn’t know, however, was that behind the scenes lurked more than a family’s pain at the dire prognosis of their only son. Hunter’s illness exposed the troubled depths of a marriage that had long been shadowed by uncertainties of its own.

Called a "groundbreaking masterpiece" by Dr. Gregory O'Shanick, medical director emeritus of the Brain Injury Association of America, this is the gold edition of the unabridged audiobook of the critically acclaimed memoir The Day My Brain Exploded, which tells the story of Ashok Rajamani, a first-generation Indian American who had to relearn everything about life after a full-throttle brain hemorrhage at 25. With humor and insight, he describes the events of that day (his brain exploded just before his brother's wedding!) as well as the long, difficult recovery period. In the process he introduces listeners to his family - his principal support group as well as a constant source of frustration and amazement. Irreverent, coruscating, angry, at times shocking, but always revelatory, his memoir takes the listener into unfamiliar territory, much like the experience Alice had when she fell down the rabbit hole. That he lived to tell the story is miraculous; that he tells it with such aplomb is simply remarkable.

After a full-throttle brain bleed at the age of 25, Ashok Rajamani, a first-generationIndian American, had to relearn everything: how to eat, how to walk and speak, even things as basic as his sexual orientation. With humor and insight, he describes the events of that day - his brain exploded just before his brother's wedding - as well as the long, difficult recovery period. In the process, he introduces listeners to his family - his principal support group, as well as a constant source of frustration and amazement.