Last Night in the OR: A Transplant Surgeon's Odyssey
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 0147515335
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
For readers of Henry Marsh's Do No Harm, Paul A. Ruggieri's Confessions of a Surgeon, and Atul Gawande's Better -- a pioneering surgeon shares memories from a life in one of surgery’s most demanding fields
The 1980s marked a revolution in the field of organ transplants, and Bud Shaw, M.D., who studied under Tom Starzl in Pittsburgh, was on the front lines. Now retired from active practice, Dr. Shaw relays gripping moments of anguish and elation, frustration and reward, despair and hope in his struggle to save patients. He reveals harshly intimate moments of his medical career: telling a patient's husband that his wife has died during surgery; struggling to complete a twenty-hour operation as mental and physical exhaustion inch closer and closer; and flying to retrieve a donor organ while the patient waits in the operating room. Within these more emotionally charged vignettes are quieter ones, too, like growing up in rural Ohio, and being awakened late at night by footsteps in the hall as his father, also a surgeon, slipped out of the house to attend to a patient in the ER.
In the tradition of Mary Roach, Jerome Groopman, Eric Topol, and Atul Gawande, Last Night in the OR is an exhilarating, fast-paced, and beautifully written memoir, one that will captivate readers with its courage, intimacy, and honesty.
ambulance and up to Columbus quicker than you can put in one of those swan-things.” “But I’m sure some of them probably die on the way and—” “Hell, Ohio State bought one of those helicopters. They were down here last week during the fair giving people rides. They say from the moment we call them they can be down here in less than twenty minutes.” I didn’t know what to say. Maybe he was right. He had a big university hospital less than forty miles away. Why complicate things? “Besides,” he
staggered backward, away from Ellen Hutchinson. Ross tried to hold me up but we both fell to the floor. Believe in Life In August 2012, my wife Rebecca’s grandmother and father died within ten days of each other. A month later, my second stepmother, who was twenty-five years younger than my dad and a teetotaler, called to tell me she had leukemia. She died a few months later, four days before Christmas; my father died of a failing heart the following summer. They all had incurable problems and
big-bellied gentleman I found lying lifeless on his back in a pool of shit and piss and dressed in a pair of red-and-white-striped pajama bottoms. Another, younger man pacing back and forth and wringing his hands asked me what took so fucking long and I apologized, set the crash kit down, pulled out a stethoscope to try and hear something, felt his wrist and neck, and decided to go through the motions anyway. I managed to insert a tube through his mouth into his trachea and persuaded the other
development project. That was the year I spent much of the last week of winter in my daughter’s hospital room. I was sure that if I left, something bad would happen. More often than not it did. I was there on the first night, when the nurse didn’t recognize that Natalie was going back into septic shock and needed resuscitation. I can’t bear to consider what might have happened had I gone home to sleep in my own bed. I wasn’t there a few days later when they gave her an exceptionally large slug
Starzl called for the new liver, Carlos brought it up in a bag of icy water and Tom reached in, hauled it out like a tuna, and laid it on a towel. Fog rolled off the pale, glistening surface and Shun held it between his hands so that the opening of the vena cava at the top was exposed. Starzl put in some stay sutures, then lowered the liver into place while Shun and Carlos pulled up on the stays. “Go, for God’s sake,” Starzl said. He tied the stay suture on his side and Shun tied his. And then