(ICU and patient stories)
A doctor's moving memoirs from an intensive care unit. Stories from the ICU, or intensive care unit, usually begin with sirens and ambulance lights and end with the rescue or death of a patient. We also often hear about advanced technology and innovative treatments that save lives. Daniela Lamas, a doctor working in the ICU, argues, however, that we only know a small part of these stories. After one of her difficult on-call duties, she asked herself a surprisingly simple question: how do people function who have had their lives extended by days, months and sometimes years by modern medicine? The author answers this question by analysing the most personal stories of her former patients and their relatives. A grandfather whose dying heart was replaced by a battery-operated pump; a salesman who found a kidney donor on a social networking site; and a young woman trying to find her way into the adulthood she was not going to live to see. All these moving stories play out on the fine line between health and illness, life and death
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