The first novel, The Sins of the Fathers, appeared in 1975, and A Drop of the Hard Stuff - the 17th and most recent - was published in 2011. Over the years Scudder has also been featured in 11 short works of fiction. The Merciful Angel of Death is the fifth of these; it frst appeared in 1993 in The New Mystery, Jerome Charyn's anthology of stories by members of the International Association of Crime Writers.The story was written during the depth of the AIDS epidemic, and reflects its time.The Merciful Angel of Death is included in The Night and the Music, my collection of all 11 Matthew Scudder short stories, available for Kindle or in handsome trade paperback form.

    In Pandora’s DNA, Stark uses her family’s experience to frame a larger story about the so-called breast cancer genes, exploring the morass of legal quandaries, scientific developments, medical breakthroughs, and ethical concerns that surround the BRCA mutations, from the troubling history of prophylactic surgery and the storied origins of the boob job to the landmark lawsuit against Myriad Genetics, which held patents on the BRCA genes every human carries in their body until the Supreme Court overturned them in 2013. Although a genetic test for cancer risk may sound like the height of scientific development, the treatment remains crude and barbaric. Through her own experience, Stark shows what it’s like to live in a brave new world where gazing into a crystal ball of genetics has many unintended consequences.

    Full of wit and charm, Mackle guides readers through a collection of hilarious and vulnerable tales written by moms who have seen it all.Laugh alongside a group of real mamas as they tell of the never-ending joys and unpredictable perils of motherhood. Between diaper fiascos and singing potties, and whether mowing to escape reality or being mistaken as a pile of laundry--hilarity ensues. The extraordinary vulnerability found in Same Here, Sisterfriend will not only remind every mom that she's not alone, but also encourage her to look for grace in even the messiest moments.Sisterfriends keep each other sane, strong, and lighthearted, which is exactly what Holly Mackle's mom-community does, bringing a little levity to the rough trenches of mamahood. So long as sisterfriends are only a text away, they can be sure of one thing--they will never have to face the mom life alone. The mostly true tales of their misadventures include:Animal noises overheard in the Lactation CenterRewarding themselves with chocolate chips while potty trainingAfter effects of the imaginary play game "horse bath"Cell phone photos they can't imagine deletingWith a little commiseration and a lot of laughter, the ladies behind the creation of Same Here, Sisterfriend encourage moms everywhere to let go of the image of perfection and rest in knowing that their sisterfriends have their back. So it's time to link arms in sisterfriend solidarity, because we might as well laugh, mama.

    Dr. Mark Brown asked over 15,000 fellow ER staffers to share their most unforgettable moments. Now, in their own voices, these real ER personnel bring us their most poignant, heartbreaking, laugh-out-loud hilarious, or shocking moments from the war zone of medicine. Discover the manic antics and incredible skills of ER doctors when a girlfriend's smooch nearly becomes a kiss of death...a farmer's severed foot hitches a ride to the hospital...a premature baby fights valiantly for life...and all of the unforgettable cases that come through the swinging doors of the emergency room.

     With no skills and very limited knowledge they built a life in the middle of nowhere by reading how-to books and doing things the hard way. In this lighthearted memoir they face the challenges of constructing their own home, providing their own water and electricity, and learning to live with the wildlife, including their few, but eccentric neighbors. This ten year journey from soft city dwellers to independent and self sufficient country bumpkins includes accidents, adventures, misadventures, how-not-to’s and blood, sweat and tears. Their relationship evolves, as together they discover an immensely satisfying and totally new way of living life—off the grid.

    Through her work and intense relationships with patients and co-workers, her worldview was shattered, and after losing her job, family, and house, she became homeless herself. She reconstructed her life with altered views on homelessness and on the health care system. In Catching Homelessness, Ensign reflects on how this work has changed her and how her work has changed through the experience of being homeless providing a piercing look at the homelessness industry, nursing, and our country s health care safety net."

    Meghan Weir first dons her scrubs and steps onto the floor of Children’s Hospital Boston as a newly minted resident, her head is packed with medical-school-textbook learning. She knows the ins and outs of the human body, has memorized the correct way to perform hundreds of complicated procedures, and can recite the symptoms of any number of diseases by rote. But none of that has truly prepared her for what she is about to experience. From the premature infants Dr. Weir is expected to care for on her very first day of residency to the frustrating teenagers who visit the ER at three in the morning for head colds, each day brings with it new challenges and new lessons. Dr. Weir learns that messiness, fear, and uncertainty live beneath the professional exterior of the doctor’s white coat. Yet, in addition to the hardships, the practice of medicine comes with enormous rewards of joy, camaraderie, and the triumph of healing. The three years of residency—when young doctors who have just graduated from medical school take on their own patients for the first time—are grueling in any specialty. But there is a unique challenge to dealing with patients too young to describe where it hurts, and it is not just having to handle their parents. In Between Expectations: Lessons from a Pediatric Residency, Dr. Weir takes readers into the nurseries, ICUs, and inpatient rooms of one of the country’s busiest hospitals for children, revealing a world many of us never get to see. With candor and humility, she explores the many humbling lessons that all residents must learn: that restraint is sometimes the right treatment option, no matter how much you want to act; that some patients, even young teenagers, aren’t interested in listening to the good advice that will make their lives easier; that parents ultimately know their own children far better than their doctors ever will. Dr. Weir’s thoughtful prose reveals how exhaustion and doubt define the residency experience just as much as confidence and action do. Yet the most important lesson that she learns through the months and years of residency is that having a good day on the floor does not always mean that a patient goes home miraculously healed—more often than not, success is about a steady, gradual discovery of strength. By observing the children, the parents, and other hospital staff who painstakingly provide care each day, Dr. Weir finds herself finally developing into the physician (and the parent) she hopes to become. These stories—sometimes funny, sometimes haunting—expose the humanity that is so often obscured by the doctor’s white coat.

    He sweeps her off her feet with promises the one thing her younger boyfriend won't give her – a baby. She takes the biggest risk of her life, leaving all certainties behind for love.All too quickly, the romance turns sour, and Simon goes from charming to controlling, from magnetic to threatening. By the time Kay uncovers his violent past, Simon has decided he will not let her go – and he's not a man to be argued with. Trapped in a terrifying relationship, isolated from friends and family, Kay must decided what she values most, and fight for it.

    Stay Tuned is Jenniffer"s story of a father and daughter's journey from materialistic journalists to spiritually attuned spiritual beings--a journey that continues even after his death.During his illness, while Tim turns to alternative treatments like chi gong and reiki sessions, Jenniffer reads Neale Donald Walsch, starts a spiritual diet plan and uses the law of attraction to find free parking spaces. The book takes you on a witty, irreverent trip through popular spiritual beliefs and insights of masters and celebrities, including Don Miguel Ruiz, James Van Praagh and Russell Crowe, as this intelligent, award-winning broadcaster transforms from "cynical daughter" to "spiritual woman."

    Especially having been through the same rigmarole when he was 11! Needless to say, Luke Ryan is eyeing off 33 warily.There's only one course of action to take after you've fought off cancer twice – stand-up comedy. Growing out of a sell-out show at the Melbourne Comedy Festival, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Chemo is a warm-hearted and hilarious memoir from someone who has laughed in the face of more adversity than most of us would face in a lifetime.Luke's is a life marked by cancer, not defined by it. These are stories of growing up, getting sick, getting better, getting sick again, dating while bald, keeping your semen in the freezer and living life to the full.

    For the parents of sick and premature babies, some weighing less than a pound and no bigger than a can of cola, the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit -- the "Baby ER" -- is their one bastion of hope during the most terrifying moments of their lives, when their children's very survival hangs in the balance. Given unprecedented access to this normally private world, Humes witnesses the midnight deliveries, the harrowing Code Blues, the heart-wrenching setbacks; be there when a young mother first holds her son as he finally emerges from the incubator, and for the triumphant day of discharge, when families are at last made whole.Set in Southern California's Long Beach Memorial Medical Center, home to one of the largest and most respected neonatal units in the nation, "Baby ER" also describes the inspiring and dramatic efforts of the uniquely gifted physicians, nurses and other healers who work medicine's tiniest miracles, bringing life to a place where, for all but a minute fraction of human history, death has reigned supreme. The neonatal unit has been transformed in recent years by revolutionary advances that have enabled impossibly small preemies not only to survive but to thrive. Children born so early they would have been considered miscarriages fifteen years ago are now going home in their car seats thanks to state-of-the-art care; parents who would have faced unspeakable lossnow have diapers to change.But there is also a cost to the wonders of technology and skill that preserve such fragile lives. Though joy is most often the result of this remarkable brand of medicine called neonatology, a life saved does not always lead to a life worth living. The accompanying burdens -- sometimes grievous ones -- raise difficult moral, ethical and financial questions. In a narrative both lyrical and intense, Humes does not skirt these tough questions, nor do the talented physicians at the center of "Baby ER," who must ask themselves not only how far they can go to save a child, but how far they should go. In an era when aggressive new fertility treatments have created an epidemic of high-risk multiple births, and one in ten babies in the U.S. is born premature, "Baby ER" provides a timely and compelling portrait of medicine's brave new world.

    During her 24-hour shifts at Heathrow, Dr Green had to be ready for anything: from finding an abandoned suitcase leaking blood onto the carousel, to discovering a man smuggling heroin in a corset.It's a job that brought her into contact with all walks of life; her patients included drug mules and fugitives, schizophrenics and stowaways, refugees and tourists. And with the threats of a nerve agent poisoning or a Level Four viral epidemic always in the back of her mind, Dr Green found herself on the frontline where the decisions are made about who - or what - was allowed to leave the airport's borders.FLIGHT RISK reveals the drama that takes place behind-the-scenes of an airport and what is needed to make critical decisions in this hidden no-man's land of geopolitics, terror, tragedy and medicine.

    Paul Seward leads us in his memoir through suspenseful diagnoses and explorations of anatomy. By his side, we learn to distinguish nursemaid's elbow from a true broken arm. We learn how our breathing and swallowing mechanisms resemble a practical joke.But when a baby’s heart stops and a young doctor forgets what to do, the situation is far from funny. Within the conditions of great stress and rapid decision-making that are routine in the ER, Dr. Seward shows us that physicians must be more than technicians of the body; they must be restorers of the human. Whether it is comforting anxious family or subjecting a distressed patient to tough procedures—resulting, once, in a patient’s punching our doctor—on every shift, a physician learns the difficult work of caring for strangers.Yet this is a physician who rejects doctor-as-god narratives. He highlights the essential role of nurses and other colleagues, including a pharmacist whose story is hard to forget. Throughout Patient Care, Dr. Seward reflects on how a life in medicine tests what it means to put ethics into practice.

    Escaping the clich�s of fleeting young love, their summer romance bloomed into a relationship that survived college and culminated in a marriage and two children. From the outside looking in, their life had all the trappings of what most would consider a success story.But, as in any marriage, things weren't always as they seemed. On top of the typical stresses of parenting, money, and work, there were Aaron's untended wounds of depression, addiction, and family trauma. Then, when burning lesions appeared on his body overnight, Eleanor was as baffled as his doctors. There seemed to be no obvious diagnosis, let alone a cure. And when the lesions gave way to Aaron's increasingly disturbed concerns about parasites living inside him, the husband she loved began to unravel before her eyes. A new fissure ruptured in their marriage, and new questions piled onto old ones: Where does physical illness end and mental illness begin? Where does one person end and another begin? And how do we exist alongside someone else's suffering?Emotional, propulsive, and at times heartbreaking, EVERYTHING I HAVE IS YOURS tells the story of a marriage tested by powerful forces out of both partners' control. It's not only a memoir of a wife's tireless quest to heal her husband, but one that asks just what it means to accept someone as they are.

    From England to Mexico, and Iceland to Pakistan, Gilmour takes us on an extraordinary thrill-ride with his wild coworkers. Along the way he learns a few things, too, and shows us not only how precious life truly is, but how to passionately embrace it.