He liked the work and he liked the pay. But a chance remark by one of his coworkers made him realize that he wanted to involve himself in something bigger, something more meaningful than crushing rocks and drinking beer.In his acclaimed first memoir, Hot Lights, Cold Steel, Collins wrote passionately about his four-year surgical residency at the prestigious Mayo Clinic. Blue Collar, Blue Scrubs turns back the clock, taking readers from his days as a construction worker to his entry into medical school, expertly infusing his journey to become a doctor with humanity, compassion and humor. From the first time he delivers a baby to being surrounded by death and pain on a daily basis, Collins compellingly writes about how medicine makes him confront, in a very deep and personal way, the nature of God and suffering—and how delicate life can be.

    This is the story of a surgeon in training and his adventures during the years of his residency.

    They do their best work under pressure. Janice Hudson was an adrenaline-charged emergency room nurse in a San Francisco-area hospital when a friend told her about CALSTAR, a fledgling helicopter ambulance service with an opening for a flight nurse. Weeks later she was swooping over the Bay Area to scenes of shootings, accidents and disasters. The trauma junkie had found her element.Hudson spent ten years as a flight nurse, answering calls that were by turns horrifying, heroic and absurd. She decries her personal flights from hell that involved children and drunk drivers. In this moving story, she recalls her triumphs, like the time she performed a surgical cricothyrotomy on a patient as he hung upside down in his overturned car -- in the dark. And she shakes her head at some of the bizarre calls, like the one that took her to the scene of a suspicious mountain lion attack (there are no mountain lions in the Bay Area). But no matter what the call, CALSTAR and its dedicated crew braved danger and hardship to reach the scene of catastrophe in a race against time to bring help to those whose only hope of survival lay in the speed of the helicopter and the skill of the medical crew.A born storyteller, Janice Hudson writes with compassion, insight and wry humor. Trauma Junkie is an in-the-trenches account of emergency nursing at its most demanding.

    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.

    It opens with snapshots of her troubled childhood and early adult life in two difficult marriages. It quickly transitions to our first meeting, friendship, and relationship - not without their own complications. Through those trials, she showed tremendous strength and heart. We eventually married and lived a love story that others marveled at for years. We travelled, went to concerts, built a home, and remained completely devoted. While still in her early sixties, she lost a piece of herself. Words became harder to find. Steps to perform the simplest tasks became impossible to follow. We knew something was wrong but had no idea the severity of her condition. Our world turned upside down.The latter half of the book chronicles in exacting detail her diagnosis and life with Frontotemporal Degeneration, a dementia known as FTD. I cared for her for the three and a half years of this disease. Her mental state deteriorated rapidly. I changed to a more flexible job to stay with her more during the day as she lost even the most basic functions of eating alone, toileting, or using a phone. We still created tender moments and danced but she was losing a tremendous amount of weight and required greater and greater care.Financials not allowing me to quit work, I succumbed to the recommendations of multiple professionals and made the painful decision to place her in memory care. I visited her every day, two to three times per day, and we made the best of a horrible situation. We still shared many tender moments during this last year, including the moment I held her hand as she passed. The story is told in a vulnerable and unfiltered manner. It collects writings from both husband and wife through journals, letters, and social media posts integrated into the main narrative. It captures our real-life, undying love story through this incurable disease

    Margaret I. Cuomo is inspired to seek out new strategies for waging a smarter war on cancer.This year, about 1.6 million new cases of cancer will be diagnosed and more than 1,500 people will die "per day." We've been asked to accept the disappointing strategy to "manage cancer as a chronic disease." We've allowed pharmaceutical companies to position cancer drugs that extend life by just weeks and may cost $100,000 for a single course of treatment as breakthroughs. Where is the bold leadership that will transform our system from treatment to prevention? Have we forgotten the mission of the National Cancer Act of 1971 to "conquer cancer"?Through an analysis of more than 40 years of medical evidence and interviews with the top cancer researchers, drug company executives, and health policy advisers, Dr. Cuomo reveals intriguing answers to these questions. She shows us how all cancer stakeholders--the pharmaceutical industry, the government, physicians, and concerned Americans--can change the way we view and fight cancer in this country.

    Often they seem aloof, uncaring, and hurried. Of course, they’re not all like that, and most didn’t start out that way. Here are voices of third-year students just as they begin to take on clinical responsibilities. Their words focus on the odd transition students face when they must deal with real people in real time and in real crises and when they must learn to put aside their emotions to make quick, accurate, and sensitive decisions. Their decisions aren’t always right, and the consequences can be life-altering—for all involved. Moving, disturbing, and candid, their true stories show us a side of the profession that few ever see, or could even imagine. They show, often painfully, how medical students grow up, right at the bedside.

    Her vivid prose brings the reader into bustling hospitals, tense exam rooms, and Ofri's own life, giving an up-close look at the fast-paced, life-and-death drama of becoming a doctor. She tells of a young man uncertain of his future who comes into the clinic with a stomach complaint but for whom Dr. Ofri sees that the most useful "treatment" she can offer him is SAT tutoring. She writes of a desperate struggle to communicate with a critically ill patient who only speaks Mandarin, of a doctor whose experience in the NICU leaves her paralyzed with PTSD, and of her own struggles with the fear of making fatal errors, the dangers of overconfidence, and the impossible attempts to balance the empathy necessary for good care with the distance necessary for self-preservation. Through these stories of her patients, colleagues, and her own experiences, Intensive Care offers poignant insight into the medical world, and into the hearts and minds of doctors and their patients. These stories are drawn from the author’s previous books and one is from her forthcoming book, What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine.excerpted from Amazon.com Book Description

    Access full-color pathology photos and illustrations, health history, examination steps for each body system, normal versus abnormal findings, lifespan and cross-cultural considerations, related nursing diagnoses, and summary checklists anytime you need them with this convenient clinical tool.Convenient, color-coded design helps you easily locate the information you need.More than 160 full-color illustrations clearly demonstrate important anatomy and physiology concepts, examination steps, and normal and abnormal findings.Age-specific developmental competencies highlight important considerations for pediatric, pregnant, and aging patients.Cultural competency icons alert you to relevant cultural distinctions you may encounter in the clinical setting.Abnormal findings tables provide fast access to key information on many frequently encountered conditions.Spanish-language translation chart helps you ensure accurate, effective examinations of Spanish-speaking patients.Bedside Assessment of the Hospitalized Patient chapter outlines the pertinent assessment steps specific to this patient population.New abnormal findings photos help you recognize and distinguish between abnormal conditions.Additional new full-color examination technique photos clarify exam steps for eyes, nose, mouth, throat, thorax, heart, neck, peripheral vascular, and pediatric exams. Updated evidence-based practice guidelines throughout the guide reflect the most current research and assessment practices.

    It is all here: the joy and pain, the death and drama, the mistakes, successes, and secrets. Nurse reads like a novel, but sticks in the memory like real experience-because it is.

    These twenty-eight vignettes seamlessly juxtapose visceral portrayals of life-and-death medical situations with lyrical meditations on the world of medicine and the world at large.

    From its inception as a "Poor House" dispensing free medical care to indigents, Chicago's Cook County Hospital has been both a renowned teaching hospital and the healthcare provider of last resort for the city's uninsured. COUNTY covers more than thirty years of its history, beginning in the late 1970s when the author began his internship, to the "Final Rounds" when the enormous iconic Victorian hospital building was replaced and hundreds of former trainees gathered to bid it an emotional farewell.Ansell writes of the hundreds of doctors who went through the rigorous training process with him, sharing his vision of saving the world and of resurrecting a hospital on the verge of closing. Radical Medicine is about people, from Ansell’s mentors, including the legendary Quentin Young, to the multitude of patients whom he and County’s medical staff labored to diagnose and heal. It is a story about politics, from contentious union strikes to battles against “patient dumping”, and public health, depicting the AIDS crisis and the opening of County’s HIV/AIDS clinic, the first in the city.Finally, it is about a young man’s medical education in urban America, a coming-of-age story set against a backdrop of race, segregation and poverty.

    But Cullen was no mercy killer, nor was he a simple monster. He was a favorite son, husband, beloved father, best friend, and celebrated caregiver. Implicated in the deaths of as many as 300 patients, he was also perhaps the most prolific serial killer in American history.Cullen's murderous career in the world's most trusted profession spanned sixteen years and nine hospitals across New Jersey and Pennsylvania. When, in March of 2006, Charles Cullen was marched from his final sentencing in an Allentown, Pennsylvania, courthouse into a waiting police van, it seemed certain that the chilling secrets of his life, career, and capture would disappear with him. Now, in a riveting piece of investigative journalism nearly ten years in the making, journalist Charles Graeber presents the whole story for the first time. Based on hundreds of pages of previously unseen police records, interviews, wire-tap recordings and videotapes, as well as exclusive jailhouse conversations with Cullen himself and the confidential informant who helped bring him down, THE GOOD NURSE weaves an urgent, terrifying tale of murder, friendship, and betrayal.Graeber's portrait of Cullen depicts a surprisingly intelligent and complicated young man whose promising career was overwhelmed by his compulsion to kill, and whose shy demeanor masked a twisted interior life hidden even to his family and friends. Were it not for the hardboiled, unrelenting work of two former Newark homicide detectives racing to put together the pieces of Cullen's professional past, and a fellow nurse willing to put everything at risk, including her job and the safety of her children, there's no telling how many more lives could have been lost.In the tradition of In Cold Blood, THE GOOD NURSE does more than chronicle Cullen's deadly career and the breathless efforts to stop him; it paints an incredibly vivid portrait of madness and offers a penetrating look inside America's medical system. Harrowing and irresistibly paced, this book will make you look at medicine, hospitals, and the people who work in them, in an entirely different way.

    As corporations seek to save money and government agencies aim to increase constituent access, minimum qualifications for the guardians of our nation’s healthcare continue to decline—with deadly consequences. This is a story that has not yet been told, and one that has dangerous repercussions for all Americans.

    All that changed with Josie. Sorrel King's eighteen-month-old daughter was badly burned by a faulty water heater in the family's new home, but was taken to the world-renowned Johns Hopkins Hospital, where she made a remarkable recovery. But as she was preparing to leave, the hospital's system of communication broke down and Josie was given a fatal shot of methadone, sending her into cardiac arrest. Within forty-eight hours, the King family went from planning a homecoming to planning a funeral. Dizzy with grief and close to ending her marriage, Sorrel slowly pulled herself and her life back together. Accepting Hopkins' settlement, she and her husband established the Josie King Foundation. They began to implement basic programs in hospitals emphasizing communication between patients, family, and medical staff--practices which can now be found in hospitals around the country. The account of one woman's unlikely path from full-time mom to nationally renowned patient advocate, Josie's Story is the inspirational chronicle of how a mother--and her unforgettable daughter--are transforming the face of American medicine.