Medical Biography

In this harrowing and intimate memoir, Harriet Alida Lye explores how, at just 15 years old, she was diagnosed with a form of leukemia called Natural Killer, named "the rarest and worst malignancy". The average survival time of patients with this diagnosis is 58 days. There are no known survivors. There were no known survivors. Fifteen years after Harriet's diagnosis, she became pregnant, despite having been told that her chemotherapy treatment would likely make conception impossible. To be a mother is to make a death, as death is bound up in life.

One morning in late 2017, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni woke up with strangely blurred vision. He wondered at first if some goo or gunk had worked its way into his right eye. But this was no fleeting annoyance, no fixable inconvenience.

Kristine Barnett’s son Jacob has an IQ higher than Einstein’s, a photographic memory, and he taught himself calculus in two weeks. At 9 he started working on an original theory in astrophysics that experts believe may someday put him in line for a Nobel Prize, and at age 12 he became a paid researcher in quantum physics. But the story of Kristine’s journey with Jake is all the more remarkable because his extraordinary mind was almost lost to autism. At age 2, when Jake was diagnosed, Kristine was told he might never be able to tie his own shoes.

The nation’s best-loved vet looks back at the funniest, most absurd or heart-breaking animal encounters and situations he has been in over his long and highly successful career.

Karen Fine always knew that she wanted to be a vet and wasn't going to let anything stop her: not her allergy to cats, and not the fact that in the '80s veterinary medicine was still a mostly male profession. Inspired by her grandfather, a compassionate doctor who paid house calls to all his (human) patients, Dr. Fine persevered, and brought her Oupa's principles into her own practice, which emphasizes the need to understand her patients’ stories to provide the best possible care.

Most would not expect a book about a stroke to be entertaining, but this memoir will force you to laugh through a tragedy, then cry, then laugh again. Avrel Seale was fifty, did not smoke or drink, had low blood pressure, and had hiked more than two hundred miles the year a stroke nearly ended his life. In an instant, he was teleported into the body of an old man—unbalanced, shaky, spastic, and half-paralyzed. Overnight, he was plunged into a world of brain surgeons, nurses, insurance case managers, and an abundance of therapists.

Cory Friedman woke up one morning when he was five years old with the uncontrollable urge to twitch his neck. From that day forward his life became a hell of irrepressible tics and involuntary utterances, and Cory embarked on an excruciating journey from specialist to specialist to discover the cause of his disease. Soon it became unclear what tics were symptoms of his disease and what were side effects of the countless combinations of drugs. The only certainty is that it kept getting worse. Simply put: Cory Friedman's life was a living hell.

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 Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane met at a poetry workshop in 1976, they had no idea that they would go on to write more than 40 books between them, balancing their careers with their devotion to each other, and to their beloved cats, for decades. Then, in January 2017, their life together changed unexpectedly when Patrick became seriously ill. Despite tests and the opinions of many specialists, doctors remained baffled. There was no diagnosis and no effective treatment plan. The illness devastated them both.

That Julie Yip-Williams survived infancy was a miracle. Then, at age 37, with two little girls at home, Julie was diagnosed with terminal metastatic colon cancer, and a different journey began. The Unwinding of the Miracle is the story of a vigorous life refracted through the prism of imminent death. When she was first diagnosed, Julie Yip-Williams sought clarity and guidance through the experience and, finding none, began to write her way through it - a chronicle that grew beyond her imagining.

Vincent Di Maio, MD, son of a famous New York City medical examiner, is one of the lions of forensic science. In this clear, gritty, and enthralling narrative, Di Maio himself guides us into the inner sanctum, through the cases that have made him famous, from the exhumation of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and the racially charged shooting of Florida teen Trayvon Martin to the unmasking of a serial baby killer and the mysterious death of troubled genius Vincent van Gogh.

This book explores Alzheimer’s disease through the intertwined perspectives of a patient and her devoted caregiver, offering a deeply personal look at the emotional, physical, and mental challenges they face. From the first signs of memory loss to the final days of care, listeners are taken on a raw and honest journey through the daily struggles, heartbreaks, and small victories of providing care for a loved one with Alzheimer’s.

From the OR to the ICU, Dr. David Alfery brings you into a hidden world of medicine that has never before been seen. You will witness the exhilaration a physician feels when a life is miraculously saved, the terror when a life is on the line, the shock of an unexpected demise, the grace patients evidence when facing the end of life, the anguish one suffers when a family member is perilously close to dying, and much more.

In this evocative account of navigating pregnancy loss, Jessica Zucker confronts the cultural silence around miscarriages and illuminates how she built a movement from her experience, transforming trauma into human connection. Drawing from her psychological expertise and her work as the creator of the #IHadaMiscarriage campaign, I Had a Miscarriage is a heart-wrenching, thought-provoking, and validating book about navigating these liminal spaces and the vitality of truth telling.

On October 13, 1972, a Uruguayan Air Force plane carrying members of the "Old Christians" rugby team - and many of their friends and family members - crashed into the Andes Mountains. I Had to Survive offers a gripping and heartrending recollection of the harrowing, brink-of-death experience that propelled survivor Roberto Canessa to become one of the world's leading pediatric cardiologists.

Unexpectedly denied a visa to remain in the United States, Qanta Ahmed, a young British Muslim doctor, becomes an outcast in motion. On a whim, she accepts an exciting position in Saudi Arabia. This is not just a new job; this is a chance at adventure in an exotic land she thinks she understands, a place she hopes she will belong. What she discovers is vastly different. The Kingdom is a world apart, a land of unparalleled contrast. She finds rejection and scorn in the places she believed would most embrace her.

Wie ist es, seit fünfzig Jahren mit einem Pfeifton im Ohr zu leben? Und: Woher kommt er überhaupt? Wie kann eine Einladung zum "Literarischen Quartett" zu einer Knieverletzung führen? Wie bricht man sich beim Meditieren einen Knochen? Axel Hacke weiß es und erzählt in diesem Buch die Geschichte und Geschichten seines eigenen Körpers, vom Standpunkt eines Mannes in der zweiten Hälfte der Sechziger aus gesehen: Es geht um die Gebrechen, aber auch um die Triumphe des Körpers und um das große, nie nachlassende Staunen über das Funktionieren desselben.

People from all walks of life call 911 when things go bad. These are their stories, told by the people who respond and make things better. First responders often don't tell stories, preferring to keep what happens at work private. Rescue Captain Michael Morse changes that with these heartfelt descriptions of hundreds of emergency calls, with the usual coverings peeled back, exposing the bizarre, heartbreaking, and often hilarious reactions to 911 emergencies.

Cystic fibrosis was once a mysterious disease that killed infants and children. Now it could be the key to healing millions with genetic diseases of every type - from Alzheimer's and Parkinson's to diabetes and sickle cell anemia. Told from the perspectives of the patients, families, physicians, scientists, and philanthropists fighting on the front lines, Breath from Salt is a remarkable story of unlikely scientific and medical firsts, of setbacks and successes, and of people who refused to give up hope....

Neuroscientist Lipska was diagnosed early in 2015 with metastatic melanoma in her brain's frontal lobe. As the cancer progressed and was treated, she experienced behavioral and cognitive symptoms connected to a range of mental disorders, including dementia and her professional specialty, schizophrenia. Lipska's family and associates were alarmed by the changes in her behavior, which she failed to acknowledge herself.