Be Kind, Be Calm, Be Safe: Three Words and Four Weeks that shaped a pandemic


Bonnie Henry - 2021
    Bonnie Henry has been called one of the most effective public health figures in the world by The New York Times. She has been called a calming voice in a sea of coronavirus madness, and our hero in national newspapers. But in the waning days of 2019, when the first rumours of a strange respiratory ailment in Wuhan, China began to trickle into her office in British Colombia, these accolades lay in a barely imaginable future.Only weeks later, the whole world would look back on the previous year with the kind of nostalgia usually reserved for the distant past. With a staggering suddenness, our livelihoods, our closest relationships, our habits and our homes had all been transformed.In a moment when half-truths threatened to drown out the truth, when recklessness all too often exposed those around us to very real danger, and when it was difficult to tell paranoia from healthy respect for an invisible threat, Dr. Henry's transparency, humility, and humanity became a beacon for millions of Canadians.And her trademark enjoinder to be kind, be calm, and be safe became words for us all to live by.Coincidentally, Dr. Henry's sister, Lynn, arrived in BC for a long-planned visit on March 12, just as the virus revealed itself as a pandemic. For the four ensuing weeks, Lynn had rare insight into the whirlwind of Bonnie's daily life, with its moments of agony and gravity as well as its occasional episodes of levity and grace. Both a global story and a family story, Be Kind, Be Calm, Be Safe combines Lynn's observations and knowledge of Bonnie's personal and professional background with Bonnie's recollections of how and why decisions were made, to tell in a vivid way the dramatic tale of the four weeks that changed all our lives.Be Kind, Be Calm, Be Safe is about communication, leadership, and public trust; about the balance between politics and policy; and, at heart, about what and who we value, as individuals and a society.The authors' advance from the publisher will be donated to charities with a focus on alleviating communities hit particularly hard by the pandemic: True North Aid with its Covid-19 response in Northern Indigenous communities, and First Book Canada, with its focus on reading and literacy for underserved, marginalized youth.

The match : complete strangers, a miracle face transplant, two lives transformed


Susan Whitman Helfgot - 2010
    But his heart was failing. After months of waiting for a heart transplant, he died during the operation. Hours after his death, his wife Susan was asked a shocking question: would she donate her husband’s face to a total stranger?The stranger was James Maki, the adopted son of parents who spent part of World War II in an internment camp for Japanese Americans. Rebelling against his stern father, a professor, by enlisting to serve in Vietnam, he returned home a broken man, addicted to drugs. One night he fell facedown onto the electrified third rail of a Boston subway track.A young Czech surgeon who was determined to make a better life on the other side of the Iron Curtain was on call when the ambulance brought Maki to the hospital. Although Dr. Bohdan Pomahac gave him little chance of survival, Maki battled back. He was sober and grateful for a second chance, but he became a recluse, a man without a face. His only hope was a controversial face transplant, and Dr. Pomahac made it happen.In The Match, Susan Whitman Helfgot captures decades of drama and history, taking us from Warsaw to Japan, from New York to Hollywood. Through wars and immigration, poverty and persecution, from a medieval cadaver dissection to a stunning seventeen-hour face transplant, she weaves together the story of people forever intertwined—a triumphant legacy of hope.

The Ventilator Book


William Owens - 2012
    Dr. William Owens explains, in clear language, the basics of respiratory failure and mechanical ventilation. This is a guide to keep in your jacket pocket, call room, or in the ICU. The second edition includes new chapters on capnography and acid-base problem solving, ventilator weaning protocols, and is updated to reflect current medical evidence. Conventional and unconventional modes of ventilation are examined and explained. PEEP, flow, ventilator liberation, and the care of the patient with prolonged respiratory failure are also covered. The goal of "The Ventilator Book" is to make difficult concepts easy to understand. Conventional medical textbooks are great references, but they are heavy and can't be easily carried around by clinicians who are busy taking care of patients. They also are written to be an exhaustive, authoritative reference, which means that they often contain far more information than what you need at the bedside to help with a difficult case. "The Ventilator Book" has enough information to teach anyone about mechanical ventilation, but not so much that reading it becomes intimidating.

Red Blanket: An uncensored memoir that reveals the underbelly of surgical training


John Harch - 2020
    

Doctor in the House (Doctor, Doctor! Book 2)


Alex Rudd - 2015
     A distraught woman who regrets not going to see a GP sooner. More Googled self-diagnoses than one can count… After three years as one of London’s doctors - as full-time night-time GP doing the house calls that no-one else wants to do - Alex Rudd has switched to working in surgeries. Rudd travels to a different place surgery each day, helping those struggling to cope with patient numbers and seeing those that might not otherwise be seen. With limited time to spend on each patient, he must walk the difficult line between caring for patients while diagnosing and prescribing efficiently. Hilarious diagnoses mix with genuine tragedies as Rudd sees a variety of patients, with all sorts of medical conditions. In this follow-up to “London Call-Out: Confessions of a Doctor in the Capital”, Rudd presents us with another window into the world of the freelance GP today, and the challenges they face. With moments that stir admiration and sadness, this timely and insightful memoir is as thought-provoking as it is entertaining.

Math Riddles For Smart Kids: Math Riddles and Brain Teasers that Kids and Families will Love


M. Prefontaine - 2017
    It is a collection of 150 brain teasing math riddles and puzzles. Their purpose is to make children think and stretch the mind. They are designed to test logic, lateral thinking as well as memory and to engage the brain in seeing patterns and connections between different things and circumstances. They are laid out in three chapters which get more difficult as you go through the book, in the author’s opinion at least. The answers are at the back of the book if all else fails. These are more difficult riddles and are designed to be attempted by children from 10 years onwards, as well as participation from the rest of the family. Tags: Riddles and brain teasers, riddles and trick questions, riddles book, riddles book for kids, riddles for kids, riddles for kids aged 9-12, riddles and puzzles, jokes and riddles, jokes book, jokes book for kids, jokes children, jokes for kids, jokes kids, puzzle book

ER Days


Nick Casto - 2019
    Such was the opening line to many patient encounters in the emergency departments and clinics where I spent my career as a physician. Shadow me back through the years in a series of vignettes that will give you a peek into a world of medicine that few on the outside ever see. Along the way you may laugh a little, tear up a bit or even learn something, but through it all you will experience the highs and lows of the day to day practice of emergency and urgent care medicine. Put on your scrubs and come join me now: your first shift working in the emergency department is about to begin.

Writer, M.D.: The Best Contemporary Fiction and Nonfiction by Doctors


Leah Kaminsky - 2010
    Writer, M.D. celebrates this rich tradition with a collection of fiction and nonfiction by today’s most beloved physician-writers, including,• Abraham Verghese, on the lost art of the physical exam• Pauline Chen, on the bond between a med student and her first cadaver• Atul Gawande, on the ethical dilemmas of a young surgical intern• Danielle Ofri, on the devastation of losing a patient• Ethan Canin, on love, poetry, and growing oldThese essays and stories illuminate the inner lives of men and women who deal with trauma, illness, mortality, and grief on a daily basis. Read together, they provide a candid, moving, one-of-a-kind glimpse behind the doctor’s mask.

EMT: Beyond the Lights and Sirens


Pat Ivey - 1990
    You'll experience the rush of adrenaline and the pain of loss. You'll go beyond the lights and sirens to witness the instinct of intelligence, the courage and commitment that makes the EMT an unsung hero in one of the most vital and compelling medical dramas of our time.

Shoulder Pain? The Solution & Prevention


John M. Kirsch - 2010
    Kirsch, M.D., an Orthopedic Surgeon for the common man. It is the result of 25 years of research into a new and simple exercise to prevent rotator cuff tears and impingement syndrome in the shoulder, as well as treating these conditions and frozen shoulder. Testimonials and research CT scan images are included as well as images of the exercises performed by models and patients.

A Map of the Child: A Pediatrician's Tour of the Body


Darshak Sanghavi - 2003
    . . Sanghavi is a vivid and effortless teller of human tales and quite evidently a special doctor, too." —Atul Gawande, author of ComplicationsIn this compelling book, Dr. Darshak Sanghavi takes the reader on a dramatic tour of a child's eight vital organs, beginning with the lungs and proceeding through the heart, blood, bones, brain, skin, gonads, and gut.Along the way, we meet children and families in extraordinary circumstances—a premature baby named Adam Flax who was born with undeveloped lungs, a teenage boy with a positive pregnancy test, and a young girl who keeps losing weight despite her voracious appetite. In a deeply personal narrative, Sanghavi provides a richly detailed—and humanized—portrait of how the pediatric body functions in both sickness and health.

Twelve Cases: A Psychiatrist’s True Stories of Mental Illness and Addiction [and Other Human Predispositions]


Daniel Mierlak - 2018
    Daniel Mierlak, a psychiatrist for twenty-five years, on a journey to the stranger corners of human experience. Here you’ll meet: Tony, chauffeur to the fabulously rich, who overcomes crippling anxiety only to find himself descend into a homicidal rage following a botched cosmetic procedure. Amanda, hospitalized for mania, who sees a change to her medicine as an assassination attempt, and then stalks her doctor for a year after discharge. James, a schizophrenic hearing voices telling him to kill himself, whose piano playing leads to a shocking secret about his past. Psychiatric treatment is normally a private encounter and often misunderstood. In describing twelve of his most challenging cases, Dr. Mierlak brings you into his sessions, into his patients’ lives, and into the world of psychiatry. Get ready for some surprises.

How We Age: A Doctor's Journey Into the Heart of Growing Old


Marc Agronin - 2011
    His beat is a nursing home in Miami that some would dismiss as “God’s waiting room.” Nothing in the young doctor’s medical training had quite prepared him for what he was to discover there. As Agronin first learned from ninety-eight-year-old Esther and, later, from countless others, the true scales of aging aren’t one-sided—you can’t list the problems without also tallying the hopes and promises. Drawing on moving personal experiences and in-depth interviews with pioneers in the field, Agronin conjures a spellbinding look at what aging means today—how our bodies and brains age, and the very way we understand aging.

Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain


Maryanne Wolf - 2007
    Every new reader's brain possesses the extraordinary capacity to rearrange itself beyond its original abilities in order to understand written symbols. But how does the brain learn to read? As world-renowned cognitive neuroscientist and scholar of reading Maryanne Wolf explains in this impassioned book, we taught our brain to read only a few thousand years ago, and in the process changed the intellectual evolution of our species.Wolf tells us that the brain that examined tiny clay tablets in the cuneiform script of the Sumerians is configured differently from the brain that reads alphabets or of one literate in today's technology.There are critical implications to such an evolving brain. Just as writing reduced the need for memory, the proliferation of information and the particular requirements of digital culture may short-circuit some of written language's unique contributions—with potentially profound consequences for our future.Turning her attention to the development of the individual reading brain, Wolf draws on her expertise in dyslexia to investigate what happens when the brain finds it difficult to read. Interweaving her vast knowledge of neuroscience, psychology, literature, and linguistics, Wolf takes the reader from the brains of a pre-literate Homer to a literacy-ambivalent Plato, from an infant listening to Goodnight Moon to an expert reader of Proust, and finally to an often misunderstood child with dyslexia whose gifts may be as real as the challenges he or she faces.As we come to appreciate how the evolution and development of reading have changed the very arrangement of our brain and our intellectual life, we begin to realize with ever greater comprehension that we truly are what we read. Ambitious, provocative, and rich with examples, Proust and the Squid celebrates reading, one of the single most remarkable inventions in history. Once embarked on this magnificent story of the reading brain, you will never again take for granted your ability to absorb the written word.

Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole: A Renowned Neurologist Explains the Mystery and Drama of Brain Disease


Allan H. Ropper - 2014
    What is it like to try to heal the body when the mind is under attack? In this book, Dr. Allan Ropper and Brian Burrell take the reader behind the scenes at Harvard Medical School's neurology unit to show how a seasoned diagnostician faces down bizarre, life-altering afflictions. Like Alice in Wonderland, Dr. Ropper inhabits a world where absurdities abound:• A figure skater whose body has become a ticking time-bomb • A salesman who drives around and around a traffic rotary, unable to get off • A college quarterback who can't stop calling the same play • A child molester who, after falling on the ice, is left with a brain that is very much dead inside a body that is very much alive • A mother of two young girls, diagnosed with ALS, who has to decide whether a life locked inside her own head is worth livingHow does one begin to treat such cases, to counsel people whose lives may be changed forever? How does one train the next generation of clinicians to deal with the moral and medical aspects of brain disease? Dr. Ropper and his colleague answer these questions by taking the reader into a rarified world where lives and minds hang in the balance.