Joshua D Mezrich

Interesting book on the history and progress of organ transplant interspersed with anecdotes of the author's patients. Well-structured. The only flaw is Mezrich's description of the surgeries. Most of the time, I didn't get what he is trying to describe. I have read quite a number of medical books, and the other authors were able to make the surgical process easy to understand. Nevertheless, Mezrich endears with his devastating honesty. He said he wished a difficult patient would just die (but he tried his best of course). I was shocked. What guts does it take to write that? Half a star more.… (més)

A nice combination of organ transplant history and surgical memoir. A bit specialized (for my interest), and I would have appreciated more details on xenotransplantation, but overall it was a very worthwhile read.

> The good news is he has just been awarded a MELD exception. This means that we wrote a narrative about him, discussing his horrible pruritus (itchy skin), his inability to continue with his job, and his frequent admissions to the hospital. The regional review board, which consists of surgeons and hepatologists from all the transplant programs in our region, agreed to grant him a 22. This means that a majority of liver specialists in the region agrees that the MELD system does not adequately represent Nate's mortality (or need for a liver) and is willing to have him move up the line to receive a liver in the region.

> withdraw support by the removal of the ventilator and the shutting off of the pressors (the medications supporting blood pressure). Only if the patient dies quickly are we able to procure his organs for transplant. At our program, we will wait thirty minutes for the patient’s lungs, liver, and pancreas, and up to two hours for his kidneys. We typically will not use the heart from these types of donors, as we think that waiting for the heart to stop beating prior to its removal will irreparably damage the organ.

> In 1980, the Uniform Determination of Death Act passed in the legislatures of all fifty U.S. states, declaring brain death legally equivalent to death. This legislation has been critical to the success of organ transplantation.

> when a humanitarian decides to donate a kidney to help a stranger in need, this can start a chain. One woman's kidney can go to a recipient whose incompatible donor then donates to someone else, whose donor donates to someone else, and so on. The chain can go back and forth, crisscrossing the nation for weeks on end, until it finally breaks. The longest chain the NKR has had to date included thirty-four donors and thirty-four recipients

> It was courage that sustained them through the dark years of the 1970s, when outcomes were as bad as 20 to 50 percent chance of one-year survival, with many of the patients suffering miserable deaths secondary to infection and overimmunosuppression—a period that didn’t end until cyclosporine became a clinical reality in the early 1980s.… (més)

In this non-fiction book, When Death Becomes Life: Notes from a Transplant Surgeon, Joshua D. Mezrich gives the reader a comprehensive, and personal look at transplants. But this is no dry medical memoir. He looks at the history, the medical techniques used, personal stories of some recipients and donors, cross-species attempts, and even some of the mistakes and failures including his own. He is passionate about his field but he shows a great deal of empathy towards the suffering of both donors and recipients. This is a highly readable, often deeply moving, and, in the end, hopeful look at an important field of medicine.

Thanks to Bookshout and the publisher for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review… (més)