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When Blood Breaks Down

Audiobook
Nonfiction: Autobiography & Memoir
Unabridged   8 hour(s)
Publication date: 07/07/2020

When Blood Breaks Down

Life Lessons from Leukemia

Available from major retailers or BUY FROM AMAZON
Digital Download ISBN:9781696601528

Summary

A leading cancer specialist tells the compelling stories of three adult leukemia patients and their treatments, the disease itself, and the drugs developed to treat it.

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Product Description

When you are told that you have leukemia, your world stops. Your brain can't function. You are asked to make decisions about treatment almost immediately, when you are not in your right mind. And yet you pull yourself together and start asking questions. Beside you is your doctor, whose job it is to solve the awful puzzle of bone marrow gone wrong. The two of you are in it together. In When Blood Breaks Down, Mikkael Sekeres, a leading cancer specialist, takes listeners on the journey that patient and doctor travel together.

Sekeres tells the compelling stories of three people who receive diagnoses of adult leukemia within hours of each other: Joan, a forty-eight-year-old surgical nurse, a caregiver who becomes a patient; David, a sixty-eight-year-old former factory worker who bows to his family's wishes and pursues the most aggressive treatment; and Sarah, a thirty-six-year-old pregnant woman who must decide whether to undergo chemotherapy and put her fetus at risk. We join the intimacy of the conversations Sekeres has with his patients, and watch as he teaches trainees. Along the way, Sekeres also explores leukemia in its different forms and the development of drugs to treat it—describing, among many other fascinating details, the invention of the bone marrow transplant and a treatment that targets the genetics of leukemia.

Reviews/Praise

"[A] fascinating debut…This is a powerful look at a disease that forces patients to make 'decisions that no person should ever have to make.'"―Publishers Weekly

What makes this narrative so compelling is the author's ability to bring readers with him on his rounds as he meets each patient and family member, discusses treatment options, and follows them through weeks of treatment, reviewing lab results and bone marrow biopsies, and, when necessary, discussing next steps such as bone marrow transplants...That three patient narratives should prove so effective a lesson is a tribute to Sekeres as both storyteller and physician. ―Kirkus Reviews

Author Bio

Mikkael A. Sekeres is director of the Leukemia Program at the Cleveland Clinic, where he is also professor of medicine and vice chair for clinical research at the Taussig Cancer Institute. He writes regularly for the Well section of the New York Times.