Showing titles in Medical

Twenty-five years ago, my doctors had no cure for my cancer. So I went on a quest to find my own treatment. This is my story.... 

Andrea Buchanan lost her mind while crossing the street one blustery March morning. The cold winter air triggered a coughing fit, and she began to choke. She was choking on a lot that day. A sick child. A pending divorce. The guilt of failing as a partner and as a mother. When the coughing finally stopped, she thought it was over. She could not have been more wrong.

In 1999, Munjed Al Muderis was a surgical resident working in Baghdad when the military police marched into the operating theatre and ordered the team to mutilate army deserters. When the head of surgery refused, he was executed. Munjed's choices were stark - comply and breach the medical oath, refuse and face death or flee. That day, Munjed's life changed forever. He escaped to Indonesia and boarded a boat to Australia.

Dr. Raymond Damadian was plagued with a mysterious and persistent stomach pain, yet physicians assured him that they could find nothing wrong. To find the answer to his ailment, Damadian would spend the ensuing twelve years building a machine that would change medicine. Nuclear magnetic resonance scanning, now called magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), was a revolution: A safe means to determine the makeup of every cell in the human body, distinguishing healthy cells from sick.

When American saxophonist and social activist Fred Ho was diagnosed with stage 3b colo-rectal cancer in 2006 he underwent immediate surgery to remove the tumor and began preparing for chemotherapy. Within days his friends mobilized to arrange grocery deliveries, transport, companionship, and housekeeping duties - they called themselves “Warriors for Fred”. Fred chose to write his astonishing cancer memoir as a diary, acknowledging that all the greatest warriors wrote daily diaries.

For 15 years, Eleanor Roosevelt and her handsome doctor, David Gurewitsch, were friends, traveling, entertaining, and eventually buying a townhouse together in Manhattan. Their friendship has always intrigued historians, but not much is known about it. David kept detailed journals and took thousands of photos, but he never publicly discussed their time together.

In this compelling memoir, Jane Hawking relates the inside story of her extraordinary marriage. As Stephen's academic renown soared, his body was collapsing under the assaults of motor neurone disease, and Jane's candid account of trying to balance his 24-hour care with the needs of their growing family is inspirational. This is a book about optimism, love and change that will resonate with listeners everywhere.

From the co-author of Three Cups of Tea comes the inspiring story of two very different doctors—one from the United States, the other from Nepal—united in a common mission: to rid the world of preventable blindness. In this transporting book, David Oliver Relin shines a light on the work...

In early 2011, Yolanda Hadid was struck by mysterious symptoms including brain fog, severe exhaustion, migraines, and more. Over the months and years that followed, she went from being an outspoken, multitasking, hands-on mother of three, reality TV star, and social butterfly to a woman who spent most of her time in bed. Yolanda was turned inside out by some of the country's top hospitals and doctors, but due to the lack of definitive diagnostic testing, she landed in a dark maze of conflicting medical opinions.

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.

In a book as eye-opening as it is riveting, practicing nurse and New York Times columnist Theresa Brown invites us to experience not just a day in the life of a nurse but all the life that happens in just one day in a hospital's cancer ward. In the span of 12 hours, lives can be lost, life-altering medical treatment decisions made, and dreams fulfilled or irrevocably stolen.

Acclaimed author Peg Kehret has written the true story of the year when she was twelve and stricken with polio. At first paralyzed and terrified, she fought her way to recovery, aided by doctors and therapists, a loving family, supportive roommates fighting their own battles with the disease, and plenty of grit and luck. With the humor and suspense that are her trademarks, Peg Kehret vividly recreates a year of heartbreak and triumph.

In This Common Secret, Dr. Susan Wicklund chronicles her emotional and dramatic twenty-year career on the front lines of the abortion war. Growing up in working class, rural Wisconsin, Wicklund had her own painful abortion at a young age. It was not until she became a doctor that she realized how many women shared her ordeal of an unwanted pregnancy - and how hidden this common experience remains.

For a long time, when people asked Dr. Meera Shah what she did, she would tell them she was a doctor and leave it at that. "I'm an abortion provider," she will now say. And an interesting thing started to happen each time she met someone new. One by one, people would confide that in fact they'd had an abortion themselves. And the refrain was often the same: You're the only one I've told. This book collects those stories as they've been told to Shah to humanize abortion and to combat myths that persist in the discourse that surrounds it.

When you are told that you have leukemia, your world stops. Your brain can't function. You are asked to make decisions about treatment almost immediately, when you are not in your right mind. And yet you pull yourself together and start asking questions. Beside you is your doctor, whose job it is to solve the awful puzzle of bone marrow gone wrong. The two of you are in it together. In When Blood Breaks Down, Mikkael Sekeres, a leading cancer specialist, takes listeners on the journey that patient and doctor travel together.  

Against a global backdrop of wartime suffering and postwar hope, Borrowing Life gathers the personal histories of the men and women behind the team that enabled and performed the modern medical miracle of the world's first successful organ transplant. 

Brought to you by Penguin. A week after her forty-first birthday, Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living payslip to payslip who had always been the caregiver rather than the one needing care, the catastrophic condition was both a...

“The life of a neurosurgeon isn’t an easy one, and Ben has been required to go above and beyond the call of duty almost constantly. The life of a neu­rosurgeon’s wife isn’t much easier. But it’s all been worth it. Together, we’ve been through poverty, tragedy, wealth, and joy, and...

Ein Buch über das Leben mit Alzheimer, bevor alles verloren geht – und darüber, wie viel Lebensfreude trotz allem möglich ist. Als Jo Failer mit 51 Jahren die Diagnose „Alzheimer Frühform" erhält, steht er noch mitten im Alltag: berufstätig, Vater von zwei kleinen Kindern, umgeben von vielen Freunden. Sein Buch ist der Versuch, die Krankheit sichtbar zu machen, solange er es noch kann. Nicht durch Statistiken, nicht durch Klischees – sondern durch echte, persönliche Momente.

Andrew Schulman, a fifty-seven-year-old professional guitarist, had a close brush with death on the night of July 16, 2009. Against the odds—and with the help of music—he survived: a medical miracle. Once fully recovered, Andrew resolved to use his musical gifts to help critically ill patients at Mount Sinai Beth Israel’s intensive care unit. In Waking the Spirit, you’ll learn the astonishing stories of the people he has met along the way—both patients and doctors—and see the incredible role music can play in a modern hospital setting.