Every Deep-Drawn Breath

Author: Wes Ely
Publisher: Scribe Publications
ISBN: 1922586102
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Book Description
A world-renowned critical-care doctor offers hope for patients, their families, and the future of medicine in this timely, urgent, and compassionate work about the devastating and little-known physical and emotional effects of ICU stays. As COVID-19 survivors are discharged from hospitals, grateful to be alive, most don’t realise that the hardest part of their battle may be about to begin. Many will return home and struggle with long-term physical, mental, and emotional problems either caused or exacerbated by the life-saving treatment they received in intensive care. They’ll join the ranks of critical-care survivors whose lives are completely upturned by a hospital stay. More than half of the patients admitted to ICUs will struggle with post-intensive care syndrome, which can include Alzheimer’s-like cognitive deficits, PTSD, muscle and nerve damage, and depression. Their personal and professional lives can suffer irreparably. Worst of all, no one seems to understand that they have an illness at all. Not even their doctors. Dr Ely is now a leader in the field of ICU survivorship — advocating for compassionate care in the technology-driven enclave of the modern ICU — especially relevant during the coronavirus pandemic. In Every Deep-Drawn Breath, Dr Ely sounds a warning for the millions of people who will be admitted to ICUs in coming years and a wake-up call for healthcare professionals — himself included — to turn their gaze from the latest life-saving machines to really see, as he says, ‘the person in the patient’.

Delirium in Critical Care

Author: Valerie J. Page
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107433657
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Book Description
The fully updated second edition of this popular handbook concisely summarises all current knowledge about delirium in critically ill patients and describes simple tools the bedside clinician can use to prevent, diagnose and manage delirium. Chapters discuss new developments in assessing risk and diagnosis, crucial discoveries regarding delirium and long-term cognitive outcomes, and dangers of sedation and death. Updated management advice reflects new evidence about antipsychotics and delirium. This book explains how to minimise the risks of delirium, drugs to avoid, drugs to use and when to use them, as well as current theories regarding pathophysiology, different motoric subtypes leading to missed diagnosis, and the adverse impact of delirium on patient outcomes. While there are still unanswered questions, this edition contains all the available answers. Illustrated with real-life case reports, Delirium in Critical Care is essential reading for trainees, consultants and nurses in the ICU and emergency department.

Scrubbed Out

Author: Salah D. Salman
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1463428200
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 156

Book Description
The medical profession today is not controlled by doctors or nurses. It's controlled by corporations, administrators, and bureaucratsit's become a business. Scrubbed Out presents a critique of the today's business of medicine and the profit-driven mindset that ignores human needs. Salah D. Salman is a doctor himself, concerned with the double standards and unscrupulous dealings of today's community of health care decision-makers. He does not hesitate to place the blame where it belongssometimes even with major teaching institutions and professional societies. Dr. Salman believes that a revolution is necessary to turn the system around, and offers the radical solutions necessary to reverse the trends of a downward-spiraling industry.

Breath, Eyes, Memory

Author: Edwidge Danticat
Publisher: Soho Press
ISBN: 1616955023
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
The 20th anniversary edition of Edwidge Danticat's groundbreaking debut, now an established classic--revised and with a new introduction by the author, and including extensive bonus materials At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished Haitian village to New York to be reunited with a mother she barely remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know, and a legacy of shame that can be healed only when she returns to Haiti—to the women who first reared her. What ensues is a passionate journey through a landscape charged with the supernatural and scarred by political violence. In her stunning literary debut, Danticat evokes the wonder, terror, and heartache of her native Haiti—and the enduring strength of Haiti’s women—with vibrant imagery and narrative grace that bear witness to her people’s suffering and courage.

In Shock

Author: Rana Awdish
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250119227
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
A riveting first-hand account of a physician who's suddenly a dying patient, In Shock "searches for a glimmer of hope in life’s darkest moments, and finds it.” —The Washington Post Dr. Rana Awdish never imagined that an emergency trip to the hospital would result in hemorrhaging nearly all of her blood volume and losing her unborn first child. But after her first visit, Dr. Awdish spent months fighting for her life, enduring consecutive major surgeries and experiencing multiple overlapping organ failures. At each step of the recovery process, Awdish was faced with something even more unexpected: repeated cavalier behavior from her fellow physicians—indifference following human loss, disregard for anguish and suffering, and an exacting emotional distance. Hauntingly perceptive and beautifully written, In Shock allows the reader to transform alongside Awidsh and watch what she discovers in our carefully-cultivated, yet often misguided, standard of care. Awdish comes to understand the fatal flaws in her profession and in her own past actions as a physician while achieving, through unflinching presence, a crystalline vision of a new and better possibility for us all. As Dr. Awdish finds herself up against the same self-protective partitions she was trained to construct as a medical student and physician, she artfully illuminates the dysfunction of disconnection. Shatteringly personal, and yet wholly universal, she offers a brave road map for anyone navigating illness while presenting physicians with a new paradigm and rationale for embracing the emotional bond between doctor and patient.

The Anticipatory Corpse

Author: Jeffrey P. Bishop
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268075859
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Book Description
In this original and compelling book, Jeffrey P. Bishop, a philosopher, ethicist, and physician, argues that something has gone sadly amiss in the care of the dying by contemporary medicine and in our social and political views of death, as shaped by our scientific successes and ongoing debates about euthanasia and the “right to die”—or to live. The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying, informed by Foucault’s genealogy of medicine and power as well as by a thorough grasp of current medical practices and medical ethics, argues that a view of people as machines in motion—people as, in effect, temporarily animated corpses with interchangeable parts—has become epistemologically normative for medicine. The dead body is subtly anticipated in our practices of exercising control over the suffering person, whether through technological mastery in the intensive care unit or through the impersonal, quasi-scientific assessments of psychological and spiritual “medicine.” The result is a kind of nihilistic attitude toward the dying, and troubling contradictions and absurdities in our practices. Wide-ranging in its examples, from organ donation rules in the United States, to ICU medicine, to “spiritual surveys,” to presidential bioethics commissions attempting to define death, and to high-profile cases such as Terri Schiavo’s, The Anticipatory Corpse explores the historical, political, and philosophical underpinnings of our care of the dying and, finally, the possibilities of change. This book is a ground-breaking work in bioethics. It will provoke thought and argument for all those engaged in medicine, philosophy, theology, and health policy.

When Breath Becomes Air

Author: Paul Kalanithi
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1473523494
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
**THE MILLION COPY BESTSELLER** 'Rattling. Heartbreaking. Beautiful,' Atul Gawande, bestselling author of Being Mortal What makes life worth living in the face of death? At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, the next he was a patient struggling to live. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi's transformation from a medical student asking what makes a virtuous and meaningful life into a neurosurgeon working in the core of human identity - the brain - and finally into a patient and a new father. Paul Kalanithi died while working on this profoundly moving book, yet his words live on as a guide to us all. When Breath Becomes Air is a life-affirming reflection on facing our mortality and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a gifted writer who became both. 'A vital book about dying. Awe-inspiring and exquisite. Obligatory reading for the living' Nigella Lawson

Knocking on Heaven's Door

Author: Katy Butler
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451641982
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
"A blend of memoir and investigation of the choices we face when our terror of death collides with the technological imperatives of modern medicine"--

Seven Signs of Life

Author: Aoife Abbey
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1473555833
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 155

Book Description
'Heartfelt, honest, illuminating and wise' Julia Samuel, author of This Too Shall Pass. Perfect for fans of This Is Going to Hurt. Grief. Anger. Joy. Fear. Distraction. Disgust. Hope. All emotions we expect to encounter over our lifetime. But what if this was every day? And what if your ability to manage them was the difference between life and death? For Aoife Abbey, a doctor in intensive care, these experiences are part of the job - from grief when you make a potentially fatal mistake to joy when the ward unexpectedly breaks into song. Seven Signs of Life is Abbey's extraordinary account of what it means to be alive and how it feels to care for a living. An insightful, tender and inspiring memoir that explores the reality of life on the NHS front line. 'Brilliant, compelling... A hugely life-affirming book' Mail on Sunday

The Best Medicine: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future

Author: Perri Klass
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393610004
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 469

Book Description
The fight against child mortality that transformed parenting, doctoring, and the way we live. Only one hundred years ago, in even the world’s wealthiest nations, children died in great numbers—of diarrhea, diphtheria, and measles, of scarlet fever and tuberculosis. Throughout history, culture has been shaped by these deaths; diaries and letters recorded them, and writers such as Louisa May Alcott, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Eugene O’Neill wrote about and mourned them. Not even the powerful and the wealthy could escape: of Abraham and Mary Lincoln’s four children, only one survived to adulthood, and the first billionaire in history, John D. Rockefeller, lost his beloved grandson to scarlet fever. For children of the poor, immigrants, enslaved people and their descendants, the chances of dying were far worse. The steady beating back of infant and child mortality is one of our greatest human achievements. Interweaving her own experiences as a medical student and doctor, Perri Klass pays tribute to groundbreaking women doctors like Rebecca Lee Crumpler, Mary Putnam Jacobi, and Josephine Baker, and to the nurses, public health advocates, and scientists who brought new approaches and scientific ideas about sanitation and vaccination to families. These scientists, healers, reformers, and parents rewrote the human experience so that—for the first time in human memory—early death is now the exception rather than the rule, bringing about a fundamental transformation in society, culture, and family life. Previously published in hardcover as A Good Time to Be Born.