Medical Memoirs

In January of 2021, I was given an “all clear” on my cancer. Nine months later my “all clear” turned into “two to four months to live”. To say that was a shock to me would be a gross understatement. The only way I could handle it mentally was to compartmentalize it in my mind and write about it.

This is the spellbinding tale of a mysterious doctor who revolutionized neonatal care more than 100 years ago and saved some 7,000 babies. Dr. Martin Couney's story is a kaleidoscopic ride through the intersection of ebullient entrepreneurship, enlightened pediatric care, and the wild culture of world's fairs at the beginning of the American Century.

In the novel Little Women, Mr. March goes off to war. But in real life, it was Jo March (Louisa May Alcott herself, an avowed abolitionist) who traveled to Washington to nurse Northern soldiers. This is Alcott’s memoir but she chose to use the pseudonym “Tribulation Periwinkle” to tell her story. Despite the subject matter, her account is full of amusing anecdotes as she makes her way alone from Concord, Massachusetts to DC, trying to finagle a free ticket and convinced she will drown during the journey.

At age thirty-eight, Jonathan Gluck, a new father with a promising journalism career, was shocked to learn he had multiple myeloma, a rare, incurable blood cancer. He was told he had eighteen months to live. That was more than twenty years ago. Gluck isn’t just something of a medical miracle. He’s also part of a growing population. Thanks to revolutionary medical advances, many cancers and other serious illnesses are no longer death sentences but chronic diseases people can often live with for years.

"டாக்டர். ஜேம்ஸ் லிண்ட்" இவரின் வாழ்க்கையில் நடந்த திருப்புமுனையைப் பற்றி விறுவிறுப்பாக விவரிக்கும் ஒலிநூல் இது. திரைப்படங்களில் மட்டும் அல்ல நிஜ வாழ்க்கையிலும் எதிர்பாராத "டர்னிங் பாயிண்ட்"களால் தான் சுவாரசியம் சேர்கிறது.

Carrie Host has given us a book on how to believe in the future---a future Host visualizes as a painting made up of a multitude of tiny dots called "right now." An intensely intimate journey into the unseen and unspoken aspects of catastrophic illness, told from the determined viewpoint of a 40-year-old stay-at-home mother of three

This is a true story about Brandon C. Gandy, who overcame fifteen birth defects, twenty-eight surgeries, a medically induced coma, and cancer, and became the eighth person in the world to have a testicular and kidney transplant. During all of his near-death medical challenges, Brandon persisted; he would remain an athlete and he tackled many different sports. His brave, strong journey sheds light on real-life struggles of what a miracle child has to go through growing up and how he turned his preconceived weaknesses into his ultimate strengths with his endless faith.

In her gripping memoir, Ingrid takes listeners into her world as she grapples with the devastating news that an incurable blinding eye disease is eating away at her vision. Terrified that she will miss out on her daughters’ lives, become a burden to her husband, and lose the career and independence that defines her, Ingrid, a 37-year-old journalist and mother of two, embarks on a quest to save her sight.

Lene Fogelberg is dying - she is sure of it - but no doctor in Sweden, her home country, believes her. Love stories enfold her, with her husband, her two precious daughters, her enchanting surroundings, but the question she has carried in her heart since childhood - will I die young? - is threatening all she holds dear, even her sanity. When her young family moves to the US, an answer, a diagnosis, is finally found: She is in the last stages of a fatal congenital heart disease. But is it too late?

Dr. Michael Baden has been involved in some of the most high-profile civil rights and police brutality cases in United States history, from the government's 1976 re-investigation of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the 2014 death of Michael Brown, whose case sparked the initial Ferguson protests that grew into the Black Lives Matter movement. The playbook hasn't changed since 1979, when Dr. Baden was demoted from his job as New York City's Chief Medical Examiner after ruling that the death of a Black man in police custody was a homicide.

Growing up as the daughter of a dedicated surgeon, Elizabeth L. Silver felt an unquestioned faith in medicine. When her six-week-old daughter, Abby, was rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit with sudden seizures, and scans revealed a serious brain bleed, her relationship to medicine began to change. The Tincture of Time is Silver's gorgeous and haunting chronicle of Abby's first year. It's a year of unending tests, doctors' opinions, sleepless nights, and, above all, uncertainty.

Doctors coming out of training have no idea what awaits them as they enter the medical job market. Multiple medical practices, many which are now taken over by private equity companies, are run by doctors who put profit and ego ahead of the care and well-being of patients. This shocking memoir spans over two decades and exposes the greed and corruption of working in multiple practice settings in various states across the US as a physician employer, employee, and independent contractor.

More of: You can't make this stuff up. A collection of short true stories from the experiences that made me who I am, including the most deadly indoor terrorist attack. Some are serious, some funny, some sad, some empowering. Beginning with prehospital care going to home health care. Next was a haunted nursing home, then the ER. There are stories that show WHY I can relate and some of the lessons I've learned. These stories are told in the first person because they all happened to me.

Ross Donaldson is one the few who have ventured into dark territory of a country ravaged by war to study one of the world's most deadly diseases. As an untried medical student studying the intersection of global health and communicable disease, Donaldson soon found himself in dangerous Sierra Leone, on the border of war-struck Liberia, where he struggled to control the spread of Lassa Fever. The words, "you know Lassa can kill you, don't you?" haunted him each day. He'ss forced to make life-and-death decisions alone as a never-ending onslaught of contagious patients flood the hospital.

On the evening of 10 August 2017, liquid oxygen ran out at the state-run Baba Raghav Das Medical College’s Nehru Hospital in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh. Reportedly, over the next two days, more than 80 patients–63 children and 18 adults–lost their lives. In the intervening hours, Dr Kafeel Khan, the junior-most lecturer at the college’s paediatrics department, went to extraordinary lengths to secure oxygen cylinders, perform emergency treatment and rally the staff in order to prevent as many deaths as possible.

A Different Face of War is a riveting account of one American officer in the Medical Service Corps during the early years of the Vietnam War. Assigned as the senior medical advisor to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam in I Corps, near the DMZ, James G. Van Straten traveled extensively and interacted with military officers and non-commissioned officers, peasant-class farmers, Buddhist bonzes, shopkeepers, nurses, the mentally ill, and even political operatives. He sent his wife daily letters from July 1966 through June 1967, describing in impressive detail his experiences, and those letters became the primary source for his memoir.

A raccoon bite on the arm doesn’t seem that serious, but it soon becomes a life-or-death medical crisis for Melissa Loomis. After days of treatment for recurring infection, it becomes obvious her arm must be amputated. Rewired is the inspirational, miraculous story of Dr. Ajay Seth’s revolutionary surgery that allows Melissa to not just move a prosthetic arm simply by thinking, but to actually feel with the prosthetic hand, just as she would with her natural arm. This resulted in what others have recognized as the world’s most advanced amputee.

Ronald Reagan’s daughter writes with a moving openness about losing her father to Alzheimer’s disease. The simplicity with which she reveals the intensity, the rush, the flow of her feelings encompasses all the surprises and complexities that ambush us when death gradually, unstoppably invades life.

On November 3, 2022, Mark and Mary Kay Liston went to the ER to treat a nasty cough that Mark had picked up. After hours, the doctor entered the room and gave Mark the somber diagnosis of lung cancer, indicating a ping pong-sized lump in his lung. To Mark, who was a healthy, lifelong non-smoker, the diagnosis was both shocking and confusing. In the following seventy-six days, the author journaled and wrote notes down on all his daily medical interactions, doctor and hospital appointments, and medications given.

Dr. Alagoz writes a powerful memoir on the dangers healthcare professionals face, chasing their dream to pursue a medical career with integrity and to change lives. She was a successful and well-respected Obstetrician/Gynecologist in a small Texas town, having delivered over four thousand babies in her career, when a powerful hospital administrator lodged accusations that changed her life forever.