A sobering, well-rendered reality check on the desperate need for advanced training on compassion-centric modes of patient...
A physician learns firsthand about the adverse aspects of the patient experience through her own catastrophic illness.
Detroit-based critical care physician Awdish began experiencing waves of abdominal pain and nausea while seven months pregnant with her first child and checked in at her workplace emergency department. Even before she was diagnosed and treated, she personally acknowledged the detachment patients often experience between themselves and the medical professionals charged with their clinical care, something she categorizes as an “unsettling, largely unspoken reality” in contemporary medicine. While she blames the conventional methodology of physician training, with its unwavering focus on disease diagnosis and distance to avoid burnout, she also recognizes that, as a doctor, she was in need of compassionate care training in order to connect with patients on more levels than directly pathological. “Despite completing my training,” she writes, “despite being surrounded by every form and severity of disease, I had yet to learn what it meant to be sick.” This, and further episodes of enlightenment, underpins the book’s core foundation. Awdish’s initially unknown malady eventually ballooned into an affliction of nightmarish proportions. Miraculously delivered from her deathbed, she survived internal bleeding, a stroke, liver tumors, and a heartbreaking miscarriage. Awdish also had to suffer the callous missteps and insensitive presuppositions made by hospital staff. Punctuated by descriptions of harrowing moments like waking up while on a mechanical respirator or developing hernias after surgeons applied quick stitches meant for an irremediable patient, the utter senselessness of illness reverberates throughout this carefully written chronicle of suffering and recovery. As the author returned to her livelihood as a humbled physician and grateful mother, she fully embodied and shared the knowledge that there could indeed be “reciprocity in empathy” in medicine.
A sobering, well-rendered reality check on the desperate need for advanced training on compassion-centric modes of patient care.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-11921-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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