Medical Memoirs

As a palliative care nurse, it is Kelly Critcher's job to look death in the eye - to save a patient while the fight can still be won and confront death with grace and kindness when it can't. In early 2020, everything changed for nurses on the NHS frontline. Working on Covid wards and the High Dependency Unit, Kelly spent the height of the coronavirus crisis at Northwick Park Hospital - perhaps the UK hospital most deeply ravaged by the illness.

Made to Live depicts a physician’s journey to save lives. Dr. Paul Saba begins his story with the battle to save the life of his baby girl, Jessica, who was born with a severe congenital cardiac malformation. He describes the challenges of facing difficult diagnoses through both his personal experiences and those of his patients. This book debunks the myths of euthanasia and assisted suicide.

After 28 days on a respirator, hanging in the balance of life and death at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Queens, Gary Mizel was well enough to be sent into a rehabilitation center to regain the strength to hold up his head and walk again. A month later, Mizel was released to his only family member, his sister Vicki, and returned to his home in Astoria. This miraculous story of recovery is being published in Vicki Mizel’s newest book, A Sister’s Love–How Family Bonds Can Save a Life.

In 1992, Marilyn French was told she had one year to live. A smoker of 48 years she was diagnosed as having cancer of the oesophagus, a cancer which is almost always fatal. Five years on, having battled with chemotherapy and radiotherapy, a heart attack and her back breaking, she is very much alive. And - astonishingly - her body shows no sign of cancer.

An inauspicious encounter in a doctor's surgery during a routine follow-up for IVF initiated a descent into a labyrinth of questioning and uncertainty. Those first words ushered out of the doctor's mouth started a year where the author's mind was consumed by medical research, medical terms, hospital visits, medication and explanations. The diagnosis was breast cancer.

Thaïs is almost two. Like most well-loved children, she is happy. She laughs as she runs on the beach. But her footprints in the sand, with toes turned out, tell a different story. Two Small Footprints in Wet Sand relates the overwhelming tragedy experienced by a family as a result of a genetic disorder.

A 23-year veteran of emergency medical services, paramedic Matthew Sias took a detour in his career to pursue the death-care business and found a complementarity between two seemingly divergent careers. Silent Siren: Memoirs of a Life Saving Mortician is the record of some of the more memorable calls he has responded to through the years.

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.

Ma vie a basculé une nuit où tout semblait pourtant si calme. La bête s’est glissée dans mon corps et ne m’a plus laissé une journée de répit. Il a fallu attendre des années pour, qu’enfin, on puisse poser un nom sur cette pathologie : l’algie vasculaire de la face. Les médecins la surnomment « la maladie du suicide » et comparent l’intensité de sa douleur à une amputation sans anesthésie. Ne pouvant me résoudre à vivre avec cette douleur insoutenable, j’ai tout essayé, faisant souvent même office de cobaye.

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.

A Life in Trauma is a frank, remarkable account of a career spent helping others, offering a positive outlook on the potential of Ireland’s healthcare system in the future. Concern. Compassion. Doubt. Despair. Anger. Hope. Imagine juggling these feelings every day in a situation where your work could mean the difference between someone's life or death.

Dr. Steven Hatch first came to Liberia in November 2013 to work at a hospital in Monrovia. Six months later, several of the physicians Dr. Hatch had mentored and served with were dead or barely clinging to life, and Ebola had become a world health emergency. Hundreds of victims perished each week; whole families were destroyed in a matter of days; so many died so quickly that the culturally taboo practice of cremation had to be instituted to dispose of the bodies.

As director of the world's largest abortion clinic and the nation's most prominent abortionist, Dr. Bernard Nathanson presided over 60,000 abortions. As co-founder of the National Abortion Rights Action League, he helped make abortion legal. Then, in a conversion that made headkines and astonished both sides of the abortion debate, he renounced his profession to become a pro-life advocate. But Dr. Nathanson's journey was not over.

Eleanor met Aaron when she was just a teenager, and he was working at a local record store - older, experienced, and irresistibly charming. Escaping the clichés of fleeting young love, their summer romance bloomed into a relationship that survived college and culminated in a marriage and two children. From the outside looking in, their life had all the trappings of what most would consider a success story. But, as in any marriage, things weren’t always as they seemed.

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.

At age 32, I woke up in a hospital bed. I was paralyzed on the entire left side of my body. After two weeks of extensive testing, medical doctors diagnosed me as having multiple sclerosis (MS). MS has the highest rates of depression among all disabilities. I have learned how to reframe everything, and I have minimal depression. I live an energized, full, and loving life, and I can transfer my process.

Of the three surgeons who accompanied Custer's Seventh Cavalry on June 25, 1876, only the youngest, 28-year-old Henry Porter, survived that day's ordeal, riding through a gauntlet of Indian attackers and up the steep bluffs to Major Marcus Reno's hilltop position. But the story of Dr. Porter's wartime exploits goes far beyond the battle itself.

In this compelling story of selfless courage and compassion, Cheryl Lafferty Eckl chronicles how she and her beloved husband, Stephen, moved beyond merely coping with his imminent death from colon cancer to approaching it as one of life's great mysteries—a process of profound learning, mutual devotion, and deep personal growth. Writing with stunning candor and immediacy, Cheryl takes the listener on a journey that plumbs the depths of loss and soars to the heights of the soul's release-even providing a powerful glimpse into the Other Side of life.

One of life's biggest cliches becomes a horrific reality when Douglas Segal's wife and young daughter are hit head-on by a Los Angeles city bus. Miraculously, his daughter was unharmed, but his wife faced a series of life-threatening injuries. Following the accident, Segal began sending regular email updates to their circle of friends and family - a list that continued to grow as others heard of the event. Segal's compelling memoir is an intimate and honest chronicle built around these email updates and is a profound example of how people show up for one another in times of crisis.