As I Live and Breathe

From Google Reader: Jamie Weisman was a patient long before she was a doctor. She was born with a rare defect in her immune system that leaves her prey to a range of ailments and crises and that, because it is treatable but not curable, will keep her a patient for life. In this probing and inspiring book, she brings her sojourns on both sides of the doctor-patient divide to bear on the issues of the flesh that preoccupy us all. It is a worthy addition to the best that has been written about our physical selves, a meditation on our extraordinary powers of healing and the limitations that leave intact the miracle and tragedy of being.

From Curled Up With A Good Book: Jamie Weisman is a doctor with true empathy. Empathy is not just feeling pity for someone, but is the ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes and walk around in them. To know what that person knows in that situation, to understand exactly how they feel. Jamie Weisman suffers from a congenital immune deficiency disorder.

It took eleven years of misdiagnosis, unnecessary surgery, bone marrow biopsies and the insult of being called a hypochondriac. After all of this, being around good and bad doctors, Jamie decided to become one herself. Her unique understanding of what a patient feels gives her the ability to comfort her patients, to help them understand what they are being told and how it will affect them. She can put herself in their shoes and walk around because she’s been there.

Closing the Chart by Steven Hsi (2004)

Dr. Steven D. Hsi, a family physician and father of two young sons, was diagnosed in 1995 with a rare coronary disease that caused his death five years later at the age of forty-four. Throughout his ordeals as a patient, including three open-heart surgeries, Dr. Hsis outlook on the teaching and practice of medicine changed. In 1997 he began a journal intended for publication after his death. Written with the assistance of newspaper columnist Jim Belshaw and completed posthumously by Hsis widow, Beth Corbin-Hsi, Dr. Hsis writings urge his colleagues to become healers, to look at their patients as human beings with spiritual as well as physical lives.

"Every patient should read it, if only to be made aware that they are not alone with their thoughts. Every spouse of a patient should read it. . . . Every medical student and physician should read it to learn that the biology of the disease is really just a small part of the illness" ~John Saiki, M.D., Medical Oncology, University of New Mexico

"Dr. Steven Hsi asks his fellow doctors to be more than physicians. He asks them to be healers. He says that when he thinks of healers, he sees traditional medicine men, people who are integral parts of their communities. They are in touch physically and spiritually with the people they serve."~ Tony Hillerman

Here is a review I wrote a few years back: Closing the Chart Review

"Closing the Chart" can be found inexpensively at Abebooks.com

A Taste of My Own Medicine by Ed Rosenbaum (1988)

Reprinted as “The Doctor” See film with William Hurt.

“There's nothing unusual about a patient venting spleen at the doctor, but in this instance the patient is a doctor. And with his forceful, measured but angry book he establishes himself as a "patient advocate," for during his own recent medical treatment, rheumatologist Rosenbaum "learned more about handling the seriously ill . . . than in 50 years of practice." His comment gives the reader pause: not only is the author a physician, his Portland, Ore., group practice includes two sons and his brother (another son and two daughters-in-law are also doctors). Rosenbaum, stricken with cancer of the larynx, kept a journal during his therapy and reading it, one wonders if sheer cussedness alone caused his cancer to go into remission. He rails against the indifference of those administering his X-ray treatments, expresses his resentment at his radiologist's lack of compassion. Rosenbaum has strong opinions as well about medicine's turn toward big-business techniques, the profit motive, cost-effectiveness; criticizes insurance carriers, Medicare and Medicaid. His rancor will be a bitter pill to the brethren." Extraordinary book, bears rereading.

Can be purchased from Abebooks starting at two dollars.

Wrongful Death: A Medical Tragedy by Sandra Gilbert (1995)

This is an angry, chaotic story of a man who died, written by his wife, an author and a poet. At times, hard to read, but all the more important, because it documents the disconnects between patients and their families and doctors.
On February 10, 1991, Elliot Gilbert, a sixty-year-old professor of English, checked into a major medical center for routine prostate surgery. Twenty-four hours later, he was pronounced dead in the recovery room. No one from the hospital has ever told his family how or why he died. In Wrongful Death his widow has produced a searingly frank account of one family's experience with a kind of medical disaster that occurs surprisingly often but is all-too-rarely discussed in a political arena dominated by concerns about the escalating costs of malpractice insurance. As her story unfolds, Sandra Gilbert describes the numbing shock into which she and her children were plunged by her husband's inexplicable death as well as the stages of grief they endured as they struggled to come to terms with their loss. But her major focus is on the process of discovery through which, with the help of friends and lawyers, they began to learn something about what had happened to Elliot. What are the implications of such a medical tragedy for the deceased and for his survivors? How does it feel to confront the possibility that a loved one has suffered what the law calls a "wrongful death"? As she examines the bewildering complexity of the legal, social, and medical questions surrounding "adverse events" like the one that killed her husband, Gilbert shows how vulnerable we all are to the power of the health-care establishment.
This book can be bought for $1.00 plus shipping from ABE Books.