Medical Diseases

In My Hands is a rare, often emotional look at some of Dr. Curley's real patients and real situations in modern cancer care. These stories of resilience, hope, and determination changed and inspired Dr. Curley, and he uses these same stories to encourage patients dealing with the fear and uncertainty coupled with a diagnosis of cancer.

Robert McCrum was 42 when he suffered a massive stroke which left one side of his body paralysed, his speech drastically impaired and his sense of himself radically altered. My Year Off traces McCrum's gruelling recovery as he regains sensation and begins to come to terms, with the help of his family, with what can and cannot be recovered after a grave injury. It is a moving remonstrance against human frailty and a vital and insightful exploration of hope, despair, determination and, ultimately, love.

When Joselin Linder was in her 20s, her legs started to swell. She thought little of it until her health problems started to compound in ways that baffled her doctors. Diagnosed with extreme liver blockage and dangerous levels of lymph fluid, Joselin turned to the most similar case she could think of - her father's.

Matt Woodcock's frank, funny real-life diaries reveal what it was like for him to train as a vicar while struggling against all odds to become a father. In them he lays bare his joys and struggles as he attempts to reconcile his calling as a vicar with his life as a party-loving journalist, footie-freak, and incorrigible extrovert.

Wisenberg may have lost a breast, but she retained her humor, outrage, and skepticism toward common wisdom and most institutions. While following the prescribed protocols at the place she called Fancy Hospital, Wisenberg is unsparing in her descriptions of the fumblings of new doctors, her own awkward announcement to her students, and the mounds of unrecyclable plastic left at a survivors' walk.

Hilarious and heartbreaking, profane and profound, It Takes a Worried Man is the true story of a young husband and father whose life is changed forever by his wife’s breast cancer diagnosis. Following Brendan Halpin’s cranky, irreverent, and lustful thoughts through the diagnosis and treatment of his wife, Kirsten, It Takes a Worried Man is an unflinching and raw look at how cancer transforms a family. It’s also the funniest book about cancer you’ll ever read.

Freedom 55? The so-called “Golden Years”? What if you are slowly losing your memories and your motor skills? Or what if you are the devastated witness as your partner struggles with dementia? Lewy Body Disease is a form of dementia second only to Alzheimer’s in numbers, yet many doctors and almost no lay people have ever heard its name. This is the story of two courageous people, Julie and Ken Sobol, life partners as well as writing partners. Caught up in the frightening and fatal fog of Lewy Body Disease, they started writing this book together.

AudioLearn Presents What Doctors Know About Heart Disease. Developed by a team of medical doctors and professionally narrated for easy listening, this guide is a great way to learn about everything today’s doctors know about heart disease. The information presented is accurate, up-to-date, and broken down into bite-sized sections. There is a summary after each section to review the most important points.

Nicky, a witty, intelligent, and clever 13-year-old, was diagnosed with a rare childhood bone cancer. However, this book is about more than cancer and its treatment and the fight to survive. It's about more than a mother and her son who accepted his mortality at such a young age and the strength and love between two loving souls.

This book is written from an actual survivor who wants to provide helpful information to anyone who is going through their own serious health issue or is close to someone who is battling through a major medical problem. The author was a caregiver and then, went through his own cancer diagnosis and treatments. These provided the experiences to learn how to recognize and manage the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual challenges that everyone must face during these difficult times.

From a darkened world, bound by four walls, a young woman called Jessica tells the tale of her battle against the M. E. Monster. The severest form of a neuroimmune disease called Myalgic Encephalomyelitis went to war with her at just 15 years old. From beneath her dark glasses, Jessica glimpses a world far different from the one she remembers as a teenage schoolgirl. This true story follows her path as she ends up living in a hospital for years with tubes keeping her alive.

While everyone knows of the Ice Bucket Challenge, the viral craze that swept the nation in summer 2014, too few know the truly inspirational story behind it. Pete Frates was a man at war with his own body, a man whose love for others was unshakable. He was a man who refused to fight alone and, in so doing, mobilized a global army to combat one of the most devastating diseases on earth: ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease.

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.

This taut yet lyrical memoir tells of the author’s experience with a baffling illness poised to take her sight, and gives a deeply felt meditation on vulnerability and on what it means to lose the faith you had and find something better. One day at the end of 2009, during a routine eye exam that Nora Gallagher nearly skipped, her doctor said, “Darn.” Her right optic nerve was inflamed, the cause unknown, a condition that if left untreated would cause her to lose her sight.

Surviving Myotonic Dystrophy is about Ann S. Woodbury’s struggle to care for her family who have a rare disease - myotonic dystrophy (DM). Ann’s four children and her husband have DM. In 1998, at the time of the diagnosis, even the doctors didn’t know all of the effects of DM or that it was a brain disorder. Listening to this book will take you on a journey of understanding this disease and its effects on Ann’s family members.

Straight out of today’s hospitals and labs–and tomorrow’s headlines–comes a frightening, scalpel-sharp thriller from medical insider Joshua Spanogle. In an astounding debut, Spanogle takes us on an all-too-real race against time…as a young doctor enters the dark side of scientific research, desperate to stop a terrifying epidemic before it is too late….

An internist and clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School fuses Eastern practices with cutting-edge Western medicine to help you connect body and mind to transform your health today and tomorrow.

Cancer can result from abnormal proliferation of any of the different kinds of cells in the body, so there are more than 100 distinct types of cancer, which can vary substantially in their behavior and response to treatment. Cancer occurs when cell division gets out of control. One of the fundamental features of cancer is tumor clonality, the development of tumors from single cells that begin to proliferate abnormally. Rare cancers are any tumors that involve a small percentage of the population in any age group.

Anticipating a career in medicine, Dr. William A. Haseltine was in his first weeks of graduate studies at Harvard when a legendary physician-scientist offered this advice: “You can do more for human health through science than you ever could as a doctor.” That advice hit him “like a thunderbolt” - and he took it. Since then, Dr. Haseltine has helped combat cancers, worked to contain the HIV/AIDS pandemic and unlocked the power of the human genome to develop dozens of new pharmaceutical cures.