Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery
Henry Marsh
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 125009013X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review and The Washington Post
What is it like to be a brain surgeon? How does it feel to hold someone’s life in your hands, to cut into the stuff that creates thought, feeling and reason? How do you live with the consequences of performing a potentially lifesaving operation when it all goes wrong?
With astonishing compassion and candor, leading neurosurgeon Henry Marsh reveals the fierce joy of operating, the profoundly moving triumphs, the harrowing disasters, the haunting regrets and the moments of black humor that characterize a brain surgeon’s life. Do No Harm provides unforgettable insight into the countless human dramas that take place in a busy modern hospital. Above all, it is a lesson in the need for hope when faced with life’s most difficult decisions.
by pressure on the underlying nervous tissue. On Monday morning I had awoken at seven, to the sound of heavy rain. It was February and the sky, seen dimly though my bedroom windows, was the colour of lead. There was a long operating list ahead of me but I doubted if I would be able to finish it since I knew that the hospital was overflowing once again, and that there was a shortage of beds. The day would end with the misery of my having to apologize to at least one patient, who would have
torrential haemorrhage. The woman was obviously done for. I had to close up and that was that. Nevertheless, I always had to ring him up every evening at seven o’clock on the dot to let him know how all the patients were doing. So I went through the list of all the inpatients. At the end I mentioned the woman with an acoustic. Mrs B she was called, I can still remember the name. Mrs B is slipping away, I said, or words to that effect. “Mrs B?” he said. “Who’s that?” He had forgotten her already.
with little starbursts of white flowers and drove home with it perched in a friendly sort of way on the passenger seat beside me. I could have operated on this poor suicidal man and possibly saved his life, but at what cost? Or so I told myself as I started to dig a hole in the back garden for the viburnum. Eventually I felt forced to go in to the hospital to look at the scan myself and to see the patient – despite my best efforts I found it difficult to deliver a death sentence, even on a
opened with a swipe card and if the doors were left open for more than a minute an ear-splitting alarm would sound. Fortunately since then most of the alarms have broken or been sabotaged, but our first few months in the new building were spent with the almost constant sound of alarms going off – an odd phenomenon for a hospital full of sick people, one might think. I walked into the ITU. Lined around its walls were the forms of the unconscious patients on ventilators surrounded by machinery,
opposite me in the outpatient room. I explained to them that the tumour was almost certainly benign and that he would need an operation to remove it. I added a little apologetically that the operation had some serious risks. In a reassuring tone of voice I explained that the risk of leaving him paralysed down the right side of the body – as though he’d had a stroke – and maybe unable to speak – was ‘not more than five per cent’. It would sound very different if instead I said ‘as much as five