A worthwhile memoir about hearing impairment and struggling with the complex medical community.
After losing most of his hearing in 2010, a journalist’s frustration mounted as insurance and the medical community entangled him in red tape.
As a music lover who had spent much of his career in coverage and criticism of popular culture, Holston faced a shocking transition when he awoke one morning to discover that he could barely hear anything. Though there had been warning signs—hearing aids and measurable loss—this was sudden, unexpected, and close to absolute. Thus began an extended period of difficult adjustment: communicating at work with colleagues by email and pen on paper, navigating marital turbulence, dealing with strangers who didn’t understand his condition or who thought he lacked mental capacity. But the biggest issue was trying to figure out what had happened and how to fix it. Doctors weren’t absolutely sure on the former, and their attempts to address the latter caused even more frustration when an expensive cochlear implant failed to help. This left the author wondering “whether something was still wrong with me systemically, something as yet undetected that was rendering the implant less effective, or whether the implant itself might be a problem.” Consultations with other doctors meant he had to go out of his insurance network, and haggling over the phone became nearly impossible due to his condition. This book is partly about how hearing loss affects every aspect of one’s life, partly about how dealing with insurance can make life a living hell, and partly about the effects on a marriage from such unexpected strains. “Years of writing and columnizing on a daily basis had made writing reflexive to me,” writes Holston. “I try not to let any experience go to waste. To paraphrase an old saying, that which doesn’t kill you makes for a good story.” An appendix includes useful information about the benefits and risks of cochlear implants.
A worthwhile memoir about hearing impairment and struggling with the complex medical community.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5107-4687-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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