Showing results by publisher "Tantor Media" in Medical

Rob Paulsen is one of Hollywood's busiest and most passionate performers. If you don't know him by name, you will know him by the many characters he has brought to life: Pinky from Pinky and the Brain and Yakko from Animaniacs, Raphael from the original animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and many more. So, you can imagine how terrifying it must have been when Rob was diagnosed with throat cancer, putting his entire livelihood in jeopardy and threatening to rob the world of all his loveable characters that filled our youth and adulthood with humor and delight.

A decade after World War II, there was still no such thing as open-heart surgery, and yet half a million Americans were dying from heart disease every year. After the first daring operation in 1954 and through the next three decades, five heroic surgeons braved the scorn of their peers, withstood fierce desperation, and faced possible death in order to devise procedures that would save overwhelming numbers of those doomed children and provide hope for a new life to all manner of heart-failing individuals.

Known as one of America's most dangerous cities, New Orleans plays host to incidents ranging from the tragic and disturbing to the completely bizarre - and during his career as an emergency medic, Jon McCarthy saw it all. He chronicles some of the most formative calls of his career in this autobiography that sounds like crime fiction. McCarthy demonstrates with detail and clarity that the difficult choice is often the right choice. While not for the faint of heart, each entry in this collection provides poignant insight into the bonds between medics and the people and city they serve.

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....

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.

The Essence of Invention tells the story of medical inventors who have laid the foundation for modern patient care, from the development of anesthesia and safe surgery to the advent of vaccines against smallpox, polio, and COVID-19, and how, through creativity and persistence, they have changed the world.

Ignác Semmelweis is remembered for the now-commonplace notion that doctors must wash their hands before examining patients. In mid-19th century Vienna, however, this was a subversive idea. With deaths from childbed fever exploding, Semmelweis discovered that doctors themselves were spreading the disease. While his simple reforms worked immediately - childbed fever in Vienna all but disappeared - they brought down upon Semmelweis the wrath of the establishment, and led to his tragic end.

Britney Daniels is a Black, masculine-presenting, tattooed lesbian from a working-class background. For the last five years, she has been working as an emergency-room nurse. She began Journal of a Black Queer Nurse as a personal diary, a tool to heal from the day-to-day traumas of seeing too much and caring too much. Hilarious, gut-wrenching, and infuriating by turns, these stories are told from the perspective of a deeply empathetic, no-nonsense young nurse, who highlights the way race, inequality, and a profit-driven healthcare system make the hospital a place where systemic racism is lived.

Just three days after he was born, Howard Shulman contracted an infection that attacked his face, devouring his nose, lips, lower right eyelid, tear ducts, and palate. Abandoned at the hospital by his parents, he became a ward of New Jersey under the care of a state-employed surgeon who experimentally rebuilt his face.

A month after her 24th birthday, Lt. Mary Elizabeth Balster collapses among the rubble of a shelled supply room. On the night of November 30, 1944, holed up in the Heinrich Himmler Barracks in Morhange, France, Lt. Balster's evac receives a typical patient load, but this time one of the admissions is a 19-year-old tanker she'd nursed back to health five months before in Normandy. The charge nurse on Surgical gently informs the lieutenant that the private is critical.

It begins with numbness on her left leg. Then it spreads. Even though an MRI finds a "mass" on her brainstem, it takes two more years for Meredith O'Brien to learn what is causing that numbness. Months after her sixty-five-year-old mother dies from a fast-moving cancer, weeks after her father is hospitalized and she experiences an unexpected job change, she learns she has multiple sclerosis. Suddenly, Meredith, a married mother of three teens, has to figure out how to move forward into a life she no longer recognizes.

In Heroes Are Human: Lessons in Resilience, Courage and Wisdom from the COVID Front Lines, we hear gripping firsthand accounts by those thrust into the depths of the crisis. This book is a must-listen for health care workers who have been besieged by the ongoing pandemic, for those who love them, and for any listener wanting to gain a deeper understanding of their immense sacrifices and struggles. Heroes Are Human also offers invaluable self-care insights in the face of trauma.

In his award-winning debut essay collection, What Cannot Be Undone, Walter M. Robinson shares surprising stories of illness and medicine that do not sacrifice hard truth for easy dramatics. These true stories are filled with details of difficult days and nights in the world of high-tech medical care, and they show the ongoing struggle in making critical decisions with no good answer. This collection presents the raw moments where his expertise in medical ethics and pediatrics are put to the test.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a country doctor in solo practice in the decade of the '70s - making house calls, delivering babies, comforting the dying, offering hope to the hopeless, meeting delightful and sometimes eccentric patients, and working 60 to 80 hours per week, often exhausted and in need of rest? If so, follow me as I work in a small town office and make hospital rounds in rural Indiana as a family physician. You're unlikely to forget the experiences or regret the sharing.

Fresh out of training, Dr. Chuck Radis moves with his wife and daughter to Peaks Island, Maine, to fulfill a Public Health scholarship obligation. Absent-minded and initially oblivious to island mores, Dr. Radis slowly adapts to a medical practice where x-rays and advanced laboratory testing are available only on the mainland.

Tara has it pretty good: a nice job, a writing career, a forgiving boyfriend. She should be happy. Yet Tara can't stay sober. She's terrible at monogamy. Even her psychiatrist grows sick of her and stops returning her calls. She spends most of her time putting out social fires, barely pulling things off, and feeling sick and tired.

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.

In 2014, after fighting through yards of bureaucratic red tape, leaving her family, and putting her own health at risk in order to help suffering strangers, Kwan Kew Lai finally arrived in Africa to volunteer as an infectious disease specialist in the heart of the largest Ebola outbreak in history. What she found was not only blistering heat, inhospitable working conditions, and deadly, unrelenting illness, but hope, resilience, and incredible courage.

While his wife and two-year-old daughter watched TV in the living room, David Poses was in the kitchen, measuring the distance from his index finger to his armpit. He needed to be sure he could pull the trigger with a shotgun barrel in his mouth. Twenty-six inches. Thirty-two years old. More than a decade in a double life fueled by depression and heroin.

Doctors used to tell him he was cured. That was a long time ago. Ever since he first left home at age nineteen, writer Jason Jobin has had cancer. Every five years, like clockwork, it relapses, and yet he always pulls through, surrounded by friends and family but isolated by illness. Chemotherapy, surgeries, radiation—these persist, but they aren't the milestones of his life. They can't be, he won't let them be. From helicoptering into the Yukon backcountry to teaching in an elite writing program, Jason strives to enter adulthood with some normalcy, but his is the life of "a special case."