Medical Memoirs

Acclaimed CBS News reporter Barry Petersen writes about hearing the unimaginable; what it meant, what it still means, what he did---and didn't do---and how this beautiful love story needs to be heard by the thousands of families who have already heard that same devastating diagnosis: early onset Alzheimer's disease. Even though Barry has spent his long-time, award-winning television career covering wars and events that shaped the world, he was not even slightly prepared for what happened to his darling wife, Jan, and how it would impact his life.

Julia Buckley needs a miracle. Like a third of the UK population, she has a chronic pain condition. According to her doctors, it can't be cured. She doesn't believe them. She does believe in miracles, though. It's just a question of tracking one down. Julia's search for a cure takes her on a global quest, exploring the boundaries between science, psychology and faith with practitioners on the fringes of conventional, traditional and alternative medicine.

In his early 20s, Mindy Greiling's son, Jim, was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder after experiencing delusions that demanded he kill his mother. At the time, and for more than a decade after, Greiling was a Minnesota state legislator who struggled, along with her husband, to navigate and improve the state's inadequate mental health system. Fix What You Can is an illuminating and frank account of caring for a person with a mental illness, told by a parent and advocate.

The follow up to Suzanne's Best of Year debut memoir, FRONTAL MATTER: GLUE GONE WILD, STARGAZING is a humorous look at piecing a life back together after being diagnosed with terminal brain cancer.

In 2010, human rights reporter Mac McClelland left Haiti after covering the lingering devastation of the earthquake. Back home, McClelland finds herself imagining vivid scenes of violence. She can't sleep or stop crying. It becomes clear that she is suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, triggered by her trip and seemingly exacerbated by her experiences in the other charged places she'd reported from, places from where she thought she'd escaped emotionally unscathed.

Maneater is a personal account by a specialist who approaches her work like a forensic scientist or a case-hardened private eye. Dr. Pamela Nagami is a leading authority on infectious diseases and her stories will shock, amaze, and warn listeners.The patients in Maneater are ordinary Americans. When Danielle Jordan innocently ordered a salad for lunch in Puerta Vallarta she had no idea she had just become the "host" to an organism that six years later would grow into a worm and burrow into her brain.

Medicines are arguably the most highly regulated - and cost-inflated - products in the United States. The discovery, development, manufacturing, and distribution of medicines is carried out by an ever more complex and crowded set of industries, each playing a part in a larger “pharmaceutical enterprise” seeking to maximize profits. But this was not always the case. The Price of Health is the reveals the story of how the pharmaceutical enterprise took shape and led to the present crisis.

In this heartfelt and often humorous memoir, the author shares her unconventional path through childhood, grief, creativity, and academic success—all shaped by a unique way of learning and seeing the world. From being Dux of Business College to earning a Master of Arts with Excellence, she reveals how “thinking differently” wasn’t a setback, but a quiet superpower that guided her healing, her teaching, and her creative life.

Offering examples of how to make medicine better for the healers and those they serve, If I Betray These Words profiles clinicians across the country who are tough, resourceful, and resilient, but feel trapped between the patient-first values of their Hippocratic oath and the business imperatives of a broken healthcare system. If I Betray These Words confronts the threat and broken promises of moral injury—what it is; where it comes from; how it manifests; and who’s fighting back against it. We need better healthcare—for patients and for the workforce. It’s time to act.

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.

In the fall of 2019, John Hendrickson wrote a groundbreaking story for The Atlantic about Joe Biden’s decades-long journey with stuttering, as well as his own. The article went viral, reaching listeners around the world and altering the course of Hendrickson’s life. Overnight, he was forced to publicly confront an element of himself that still caused him great pain.

Yalom offers a message that goes to the heart of psychotherapy. Taking up the central existential concerns of human life, Yalom’s work engages the problems of finding meaning in life and confronting death, concerns that had lain beyond the scope of psychiatry. Writing in a literary style that reviewers have compared to Freud, Yalom details what actually happens in the intimate human encounter that is psychotherapy. Yalom does not shrink from exposing his own thoughts and feelings about what occurs; he, too is a vulnerable and searching human being.

In the multibillion-dollar business of American medicine, doctors are often portrayed as culprits—opportunistic millionaires who prey on the misfortune of their hapless patients and drive up the cost of health care. But often they are the real victims of a system designed to increase profits for the insurance companies, shady businessmen, and Big Government.

Christine Bryden was a top civil servant and single mother of three children when she was diagnosed with dementia at the age of 46. Since then she has gone on to challenge almost every stereotype of people with dementia. This is a vivid account of the author's experiences of living with dementia, exploring the effects of memory problems, loss of independence, difficulties in communication and the exhaustion of coping with simple tasks. She describes how, with the support of her husband, Paul, she continues to lead an active life and explains how professionals and carers can help.

Crushed between a truck and a tree, Simon and his wife were both pronounced dead at the scene of a horrific car accident. Enduring a broken skull, jaw, arms, clavicle and pelvis, followed by a coma, Simon lives to tell his remarkable journey from tragedy to triumph.

The search to find medicines is as old as disease, which is to say as old as the human race. Through serendipity - by chewing, brewing, and snorting - some Neolithic souls discovered opium, alcohol, snakeroot, juniper, frankincense, and other helpful substances. Ötzi the Iceman, the 5,000-year-old hunter frozen in the Italian Alps, was found to have whipworms in his intestines and Bronze Age medicine, a worm-killing birch fungus, knotted to his leggings.

Regarded as one of the finest journalists of her generation, Mamie Baird Magnusson's whole life was a celebration of words - words that she fought to retain in the grip of a disease which is fast becoming the scourge of the 21st century. Married to writer and broadcaster Magnus Magnusson, they had five children of whom Sally is the eldest.

At 30 years old Bryan Bishop’s life was right on track: as the sidekick on The Adam Carolla Show, his career was taking off and, newly engaged, his personal life was soaring to new heights. Then he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. Suddenly Bryan’s promising future was looking at a troubling schedule of radiation and chemotherapy. But having found refuge in comedy, "Bald Bryan" recounts his alternately heartbreaking and hysterical experience of cancer treatment and recovery.

ALS is a deadly disease that didn't want to let go of me. I went from hope to planning my own death as a way of escaping this demon. My journey is a view into the life of a person who needs 24-hour care, never any privacy. I was given 18 months to get my affairs in order. That lead me to seeking a higher power than the doctors. I have never witnessed an energy healing until it happened to me. This book is my call to each of you and your family who are challenged by ALS. My frame of mind was my only power.

Ady Barkan loved taking afternoon runs on the California coast and holding his newborn son, Carl. But one day, he noticed a troubling weakness in his hand. At first, he brushed it off as carpal tunnel syndrome, but after a week of neurological exams and two MRIs, he learned the cause of the problem: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease. At age 32, Ady was given just three to four years to live. Yet despite the devastating diagnosis, he refused to let his remaining days go to waste.