Here is another memoir, sort of like D V, sort of like the Boy Kings of Texas, recalling days and events. But Dr Shaw is more like Domingo Martinez than Diana Vreeland. Bud is king of the OR, not the barrio, but with as much if not more machismo. But it is his family, their dreadfully poor health and his own anxiety attacks that knock you back on your heels to conclude that surgeons go through life like us all despite their mystique.
I have some emotional obligation to read about healthcare given my most recent assignments. I encourage my team to read Five Days at Memorial, not just to learn about natural disaster response, but to read about the superhuman efforts people can do when they have to. Dr Shaw was marked both genetically and emotionally to become a physician: his father was a small town doctor/surgeon and his mother died young from lung cancer. He relates so much about his family's encounters with illnesses: his father's final years under hospice care; his daughter's near-death from MRSA; his own botulism during med school. And he expertly balances (wonder if he is a Libra) the superpowers and enormous egos of the transplant surgeons against the gnawing realities of debilitating, deadly diseases. I think the balance tips to the diseases.
And that makes the memoir so riveting. Shaw is not a god-doctor; he is a man, with a family. A man who jumps off cliffs to hang glide; a man who goes through a bad divorce; a man who watches his surgeon father struggle to open the cellophane around a package of crackers. But a trained and devoted person who sits with his patients' families, who teaches his skills to new residents, who, best of all, always expects the worst thing that could happen will happen post-op, before anyone else notices a symptom.
This really was not the book to read over the past couple of days when a bad blood count turned into gall bladder problems for my husband who will soon need surgery. He is starting to look like our kids old Operation game. Hopefully, this can be put off until spring as no pain has set in yet.
While between paragraphs in this blog entry, I searched to see if I could find Dr Shaw's birth date (couldn't) and ended up watching a video on one of his surgeries. It just couldn't have been real ... there was no blood on any of the team or the floor and the patient initially was conscious enough to squeeze his hand. The film did show a big liver going into an even bigger hold in the torso of some person. How could you not feel like a god.
PS It continues to happen. Dr Shaw while working one summer in Yellowstone Park's small clinic encounters a patient from Queens who lives on Utopia Parkway, the title of my next biography for Joseph Cornell
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