Living Time - Faith and Facts to Transform Your Cancer Journey

Informationen zum Autor Bernadine Healy, M.D., is one of America's best-known physicians. A cardiologist by training, she is the former head of the National Institutes of Health, the American Red Cross, and the College of Medicine and Public Health at Ohio State University. She is currently the health editor for US News and World Report and writes the magazine's bi-weekly "On Health" column. She also makes nationwide speaking and media appearances about our most crucial health issues. Klappentext Living Time is at once a personal odyssey! an intimate doctor-patient communication! and a prescriptive guide for patients and their families. Writing with wit and humility! Dr. Bernadine Healy shares the hard-won insights that transformed her own struggle with a deadly cancer more than seven years ago! affirming her identity as patient and doctor with the many who share this journey. Together with more than ten million survivors in the United States alone! Dr. Healy! former director of the National Institutes of Health! is a close witness to the medical advances that have brought us to a turning point in the war on cancer. This quiet revolution is curing a growing number of cancers and transforming many others from a death sentence to a chronic illness! one that calls for vigilance but not despair. Beginning with her own compelling story! Dr. Healy interweaves it with one of the most lucid narratives ever written of what cancer is! how it works in our bodies! and how we can defeat it. She explains how genetic research and other new approaches are radically altering diagnosis and treatment! and she offers precise and empowering ways for patients and their families to access the information and support they need to secure the best in modern cancer care. She also underlines the urgency of accelerating the pace of research that could map out and destroy cancer in the twenty-first century. Dr. Healy is forthright about the rigors of treatment and the toll cancer still takes! but readers will come away from her book with the information! resources! and heartfelt encouragement they need to look forward to a future with hope. Chapter One A Valentine's Day SO THIS IS HOW I DIE. These words ran through my mind as I lay in the emergency room of the Cleveland Clinic on Valentine's Day, 1999. It was in the wee hours of the morning, a time I remembered all too well from my medical residency years at Johns Hopkins. That's when the ER would fill up with drunks and drug addicts, knife and gunshot casualties, car accident survivors, and early morning heart attack victims. Many years had passed since then, but now I was one of them, an emergency room patient in great distress. I had just received startling information that would forever change my life. Only a few hours earlier, my husband, Fred, and I were sitting up in bed watching the Oscar De La Hoya fight on HBO. At some point that I cannot recall, I passed out, only to awaken with the local rescue squad standing by our bed. I was confused. Why were they talking to Fred about my ambulance ride to the hospital? Why was my husband on the phone with his good friend Al Lerner, asking him to meet us in the emergency room? I protested that this was all unnecessary, that I felt entirely well. I had an overwhelming desire to stay and comfort our terrified twelve-year-old, Marie, trembling in the shadows, and to talk to Michele, my sister, who'd rushed over to be with her. Despite these protests, I soon found myself strapped to a narrow gurney in an ambulance with flashing lights, hurtling along dark, deserted streets into midtown Cleveland. Dr. Patrick Sweeney, the gentle, white-haired neurologist who was the attending physician that evening, met us in the ER, ready to perform the usual neurological tests for what my husband believed had been a seizure. Fred is a renowned cardiac surgeon and at t...

Product details

• Authors: Bernadine Healy
• Publisher: Bantam Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 25.03.2008
• EAN: 9780553384543
• ISBN: 978-0-553-38454-3
• No. of pages: 352
• Dimensions: 143 mm x 223 mm x 22 mm
• Subjects: Guides > Health > Illnesses, therapies; Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Medicine > General