Medical Memoirs

In Return to Joy, Dr. Keith Kahle offers a raw, deeply personal exploration of the long-term effects of “father-wounding”—a form of trauma rooted in unmet emotional needs, silence, or absence from a paternal figure. Drawing from his own life experiences, Kahle examines how these wounds manifest throughout adulthood in relationships, physical and emotional health, and personal identity. With a blend of memoir, medical insight, and compassionate storytelling, he shows how seemingly minor childhood messages can create lifelong patterns of shame, reactivity, and self-doubt.

Behind the counter of your local pharmacy lies a world of wisdom you may never have tapped into. In Call the Pharmacist, award-winning pharmacist and women’s health advocate Elizabeth Roddick shares her decades of experience helping thousands of patients make sense of their medicines, lifestyle changes and health challenges.

À 51 ans, Nathalie se fait dire que son pancréas est comme un gruyère. Quelques mois plus tard, elle apprend qu'elle est atteinte du cancer du pancréas, le terrible, celui dont le taux de survie n'est que de 10 % tous stades confondus. Nathalie a su transformer ses défis en source de courage et de détermination. Elle ne se laisse pas abattre par les statistiques mais se laisse plutôt guider par sa volonté de vivre. Sa curiosité s’active, elle s’informe à différentes sources, elle expérimente et fait preuve de discernement dans le but de prendre des décisions éclairées.

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.

In January 2019, after experiencing a lifetime of poor sleep and a rapid and dramatic degeneration of his ability to sleep over the course of 2018, author and nondual entheogenic educator Martin Ball completely lost the ability to sleep for 10 consecutive days. This horrific event, what lead up to it, and the challenging and difficult aftermath is explored in intimate personal detail in this book. No stone is left unturned in this unintentional exploration of the altered states of being awake.

A coming-of-age memoir for modern times, Bleeder is the incredibly compelling tale of author Shelby Smoak. A hemophiliac, Smoak discovered he had been infected with HIV during a blood transfusion at the start of his college career. This devastating and destabilizing news led Smoak to see his world from an entirely new perspective, one in which life-threatening illness was perpetually just around the corner. Set in the 1990s along the North Carolina coast, Bleeder traces Smoak’s quest for love in a world that feels increasingly dangerous.

As a happily married, 55-year-old professional woman, Susan had it all-or thought she did - until the day of her shocking diagnosis with stage IV Mantle Cell Lymphoma, a rare and aggressive disease. Ninety-eight percent of her bone marrow was cancerous, and a heart attack or brain aneurism was imminent. Within minutes of being admitted to the hospital, her beautifully ordinary life disappeared.

Helena Rho was six years old when her family left Seoul, Korea, for America and its opportunities. Years later, her Korean-ness behind her, Helena had everything a model minority was supposed to want: she was married to a white American doctor and had a beautiful home, two children, and a career as an assistant professor of pediatrics. For decades she fulfilled the expectations of others. All the while Helena kept silent about the traumas - both professional and personal - that left her anxious yet determined to escape.

Fleeing Communist Czechoslovakia with his wife Marica, Vilcek continued his research at NYU School of Medicine, going on to establish a highly successful career in biomedical research and creating one of the most important and trailblazing medicines of our age.

When Ronald Reagan chose C. Everett Koop to be Surgeon General of the United States in 1981, liberal politicians, women's groups, and even the public health community opposed the nomination because of his conservative social views and strong anti-abortion beliefs. By the time he left office in 1989, the same people who had vilified him as "Dr. Kook" were singing his praises, and many conservative politicians and activists were criticizing him as a traitor.

It Started with a Finger Up My A*se is not your typical prostate cancer memoir—it’s a brutally honest, unexpectedly funny, and a deeply human journey through a diagnosis millions of men face but few talk about. I was diagnosed in 2024, and what followed was equal parts terrifying, ridiculous, painful, and oddly enlightening. This audiobook is filled with things you won’t hear in polite conversation, but probably should—from awkward intrusive exams and midnight fears, to German penis pumps and injections in a place they do not belong.

Médecin généraliste depuis une dizaine d'années, le docteur Gentamycine a soigneusement noté les meilleures répliques de ses patients... et le moins que l'on puisse dire c'est qu'ils ont du talent ! L'humour est-il un bon moyen de guérir ? En tout cas, il permet de détendre l'atmosphère parfois pesante d'une consultation.

Just when Linda Varisco thought the storm had passed, her life plunges even deeper into turmoil, forcing her to confront the unimaginable. With her dazzling million-dollar smile now hiding more secrets than it reveals, Linda bravely steps into single parenthood, rebuilding her chiropractic practice and trying to piece together a new normal from the shattered fragments left behind by her husband’s betrayal and addiction.

Nothing Left to Prove, Nothing Left to Hide chronicles the life of Major Sebastian Thomas Tosto, from his troubled childhood in suburban Connecticut through his improbable path to becoming a physician, a paratrooper, and ultimately his ascent to Brigade Surgeon in the 82nd Airborne Division of the United States Army. Tosto served in combat zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, earning both the Bronze Star and Meritorious Service Medals, and then deployed with the 82nd to New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

This is the true story, told in her own words, of "The Girl with the Million Dollar Smile", how everyone described Linda Varisco, the vibrant young chiropractor whose infectious grin lit up every room. But when she meets Joseph on a pristine Cancun beach in 1988, even her dazzling smile can't compete with the electricity between them. Their connection is instant, magnetic, destiny written in the sand. A successful doctor in her own right, Linda thinks she's found her soulmate in this charismatic Italian chiropractic physician who seems to perfect her in every way.

When Amy B. Scher was struck with undiagnosed late-stage, chronic Lyme disease, the best physicians in America labeled her condition incurable and potentially terminal. Deteriorating rapidly, she went on a search to save her own life - from the top experts in Los Angeles and the world-renowned Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis to a state-of-the-art hospital in Chicago. After exhausting all of her options in the US, she discovered a possible cure - but it was highly experimental, available only in India, and had as much of a probability of killing her as it did of curing her.

After years of treating patients, Dr. Michelle Choi had a moment of clarity that rocked her to her core: she wasn’t really helping anyone, and after all these years, she had lost sight of herself. The only way to reclaim some decency would be to demand a big change. After working her entire life to become a doctor, Michelle achieved her dream but realized it wasn’t what she expected. Instead of helping patients feel well, she answered corporate medicine’s unrealistic expectations and practiced assembly-line healthcare.

Dialysis: a Memoir tells the story of how a young woman's life is changed forever when her kidneys fail. From hospitalization and hemodialysis to peritoneal dialysis and finally to a transplant, the memoir explores how her experience of illness clashes with the world around her: the buoyant and youthful atmosphere of the San Francisco Bay Area during the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s. The memoir describes how she learns to make sense of what happened and how she ultimately overcomes the physical and emotional challenges of kidney failure to thrive in her new life.

SuperSummary, a modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, offers high-quality instructional study guides for challenging works of literature. This audio study guide for When Breath Becomes Air by Dr. Paul Kalanithi includes detailed summary and analysis of each chapter and an in-depth exploration of the book’s multiple symbols, motifs, and themes such as the meaning of death and the doctor-patient dichotomy.

In Custody MD: Fighting for the Woo, Dr. Adwoafuaa Nwokocha delivers a raw, gripping memoir chronicling her descent into the high-stakes hell of family court. What begins as a love story between two med school students unravels into a devastating custody battle against her ex-husband—an elite cardiac surgeon with the money, lawyers, and manipulative tactics to weaponize the legal system. Told with vulnerability, humor, and razor-sharp clarity, this book is far more than a courtroom drama. It's a powerful indictment of how race, gender, and power intersect in modern custody disputes.