Under the Eye of the Clock
Nolan, Christopher
Genre: Autobiography
Entering a school as the first student with a serious disability (cerebral palsy) after starting his education in a "special" school, Christopher Nolan had to develop careful and clever strategies for developing friendships, allowing others their curiosity, and finding ways to use his considerable gifts against the odds of both the disease and the prejudice it bred. One of his strategies is the inventive, cryptic, poetic, Joycean idiom in which he writes his story. He did, in fact, succeed in a school where he was accepted as a kind of experiment, in an area of Ireland not known for its progressive attitudes. In this narrative he moves back and forth between inner life, family life, and life at school, allowing readers to get to know him as a deeply reflective, adventurously social, and courageous human being, living with his debilitating condition with a degree of consciousness that took full account of the losses as well as finding avenues of expression that allowed him, intellectually, at least, full range of motion. The narrative takes us through his school years where he distinguished himself as a poet and also as a human being for whom life with a disability shaped an extraordinary dexterity with language.
This Far and No More
Malcolm, Andrew
Law and Medicine
Prayer as Medicine
Psycho-social Medicine
Emily Bauer, mother of two small children, psychotherapist and teacher, social, smart, athletic, and strong-willed, finds, after a curious series of falls and other accidents, that she has ALS, "Lou Gehrig's Disease," a disease that involves slow atrophy of all muscular control, leading to complete paralysis and then death. The disease is relentless, and treatments palliative at best.
First in handwriting and later by means of a tape on which she can type, letter by letter, by moving her head to press a button as a cursor cruises through the alphabet, she keeps a diary up until just days before her death. The diary, a remarkable record of her physical and emotional fluctuations, includes stories she laboriously writes for her daughters that gently mirror the confusions they encounter coming to see a profoundly disabled mother who can no longer hold them or speak to them. The story culminates in Emily's plea for someone to turn off the ventilator that is keeping her alive, and the efforts her husband makes with the help of a meticulous and sympathetic lawyer and a courageous doctor to arrange for a voluntary death.
Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes
Crutcher, Chris
Genre: Novel for Young Adults
Eric Calhoune is known to his classmates as "Moby" because of the extra weight he has carried since grade school. Though his mother is young and athletic, he has inherited the body type of the father he's never known. Now, in high school, the fat is turning to muscle under the discipline of hard swim team workouts. But that transformation has been slow in coming, since for some time Eric has taken on a private commitment to "stay fat for Sarah Byrnes." Sarah, whose name is a painful pun, was severely burned as a small child not, as we are given to believe early on, because of an accident, but because of a cruel and crazy father who stuck her face and hands into a woodstove in a moment of rage. She has lived with him and his threats for some time; that and her disfiguring scars have made her tough, smart, and self-protective. Eric and she became friends as social outcasts. Well-matched intellectually and in their subversive wit, they write an underground newspaper together. Sarah, however, lands suddenly in the hospital, speaking to no one, making eye contact with no one. Eric faithfully visits her and, per nurses' instructions, keeps up a running one-sided conversation as if she could hear him. As it turns out, she can. She is faking catatonia because the hospital is a safe place, and she has chosen this as an escape route from her father. Eric and a sympathetic coach/teacher go to great lengths to find Sarah's mother-who, it turns out, can't bring herself to be involved in her daughter's life because of her own overwhelming shame. Ultimately the father is apprehended, and Sarah, nearly eighteen, is taken into the coach's home and adopted for what remains of the childhood she bypassed long before. In the course of this main plot, other kids enter the story and in various ways come to terms with serious issues in their own lives, some of which are aired in a "Contemporary American Thought" course where no controversy is taboo.
For the Love of Babies
Genre: Collection (Case Studies)
Latina/Latino Experience
In this collection of "clinical tales," to use Oliver Sacks' term, Sue Hall, an experienced neonatologist who spent some years as a social worker before medical school, tells a remarkable range of stories about newborns in the NICU and their parents. As memoir, the stories record moments in a life full of other people's traumas, disappointments, anxieties, and hard-won triumphs where her job has been to hold steady, find a balance point between professionalism and empathy as young parents go through one of the hardest kinds of loss. Each story is told with clarity and grace, sketching the characters deftly and offering useful medical information along the way on the assumption that many who read the book will do so because they are facing similar challenges and decisions. Each story is followed by a two- to three-page "Note" giving more precise medical background and offering further resources for those who have particular interest in the kind of case it was.
Mortal Embrace
Dreuilhe, Alain
Genre: Journal
Where many writers about illness have raised questions about the widespread and often unexamined appropriation of military metaphors to describe how doctors and patients have "struggled with," "combatted," "fought," or "defeated" illness, Dreuilhe embraces it and plays it out to the far reaches of its logic. Part of the brilliance of this AIDS narrative lies in the way it brings new dimensions of meaning to a metaphor that has become so conventional as to be cliché or so imbedded in the language of illness and treatment, it simply fails to be recognized as metaphor. Beginning with the "simple skirmishes at the frontier garrisons," Dreuilhe chronicles the progression of his own illness with the sharp eye of a good war reporter who sees through the chaos of the battlefield to the strategies being played out. "Whenever I take an experimental drug," Dreulhe writes, "—and people fight desperately to be among those privileged to risk their lives—I feel as though I belong to a unit of shock troops parachuted behind enemy lines: already written off as a casualty, I'm entrusted with the task of spearheading the advance."
McGovern, Cammie
Adam, nine and diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, wanders into the woods outside his schoolyard with a new friend, Amelia, who is ten and diagnosed with pervasive developmental disorder. Worried parents and teachers wait until the police discover Amelia's body with a stab wound and retrieve Adam unharmed. Adam, unable to communicate very directly with anyone, inadvertently provides key clues to solve the mystery, which involves an old friend of his mother's, confined to a wheelchair since an accident he suffered in elementary school. In the course of recovering from the trauma the whole community is changed, and Adam finds a new friend who will very likely be able to cross bridges into his world and accompany him on his mysterious journey for a long time to come.
The Ghost Map
Johnson, Steven
Parts of medical history read like detective novels. The discovery of the source of cholera by Dr. John Snow in London in 1854 is one of those episodes. The Ghost Map tells the story of Snow's pioneering work in what have now become standard epidemiological methods. Tracing a cholera outbreak to a local pump in a poor section of London involved many door-to-door visits working with people who weren't always cooperative, incurring the suspicion and/or ridicule of both them and the medical professionals with whom he worked. In the course of the story the author offers reflections on the organization of cities and on public hygiene. Snow, an out-of-the-box thinker, also helped develop surgical anesthesia.
Picoult, Jodi
Jacob, a teen with Asperger's syndrome, has long been obsessed with the details of crime scenes and crime detection. He tends to show up when local crimes are reported, and is sometimes able to offer unnerving insights to forensic analysts. He works closely with an empathetic, intuitive young woman tutor whose controlling boyfriend has more than once tried to taunt Jacob out of her life, but she and Jacob have a strong, healthy connection that ridicule can't touch. When she is found murdered, Jacob becomes a suspect, partly because of his proximity to the crime, and partly because the symptoms of Asperger's-avoiding eye contact, twitching, and hesitant or repetitive speech-resemble guilty behavior. Though he has valuable information to offer as to who actually committed the crime, the process of making himself heard by those disinclined to take him seriously and uninformed about his syndrome, takes time, during which the disrupted lives of those around Jacob, especially his mother, become stories in their own right.
Evans, Chris; Kassen, Adam; Kassen, Mark
Drug-addicted but high functioning lawyer Mike Weiss (Chris Evans) and his partner Paul Danziger (Mark Kassen) run a small personal injury firm in Houston.
They agree to represent an emerency room nurse who has sustained a needle-stick injury and become infected with HIV. Through this work, they discover that a new safety syringe could avoid such injuries in the future, but the innovators are unable to bring it to market because of legal opposition from giant corporations.
The young lawyers become more and more engaged with the case, but they meet sinister opposition and the outcome is gloomy.
Lillard, Matthew; Clooney, George; Payne, Alexander
The Hawaiian lawyer Matt King (George Clooney) has two big dilemmas. His large, extended family is thinking of selling their inherited 25,000 acres to a developer—and he must help the consortium decide what to do for the benefit of all. Worse, his wife Elizabeth is in a coma on life support following a severe injury from water skiing. He is trying to parent their two daughters, aged 10 and 17, but the girls are unruly and sulky. He thinks that they are acting out because of their mother's absence.
The doctors tell Matt that Elizabeth will never recover. According to her living will, she does not want to be left on a machine; they must pull the plug. Matt confides in the older daughter who then informs him that Elizabeth had been having an affair. Her sullenness is sublimated anger with her mother for—among other things—how Matt had been treated. Other family friends know of the infidelity and identify the lover as Brian Speer (Matthew Lillard) a real estate agent living on Kaua'i.
Amazed by his wife's secret, Matt overcomes his sense of betrayal and resolves to respect her feelings, find the lover and give him a chance to say goodbye. The little family flies to Kaua'i looking for Brian and to deal with the sale of the family estate. Matt meets Brian's beautiful wife Julie– who is sympathetic to his situation, not knowing of the connection with her husband. When Matt confronts Brian, he is surprised that Brian has no interest in saying good-bye to Elizabeth. What, for Elizabeth, had been a life-changing relationship, for Brian, was a fling that "just happened" and which he wants to forget. He is terrified that Julie will discover his infidelity and leave him.
Matt contends that "things do not just happen." Everything happens for a reason. Wondering what his own role had been in Elizabeth's reasons for taking part in the affair, Matt goes home for her death. But he also decides not to sell the family estate and keep it as a nature preserve over the opposition of many cousins. Brian never appears, but Julie has learned of his infidelity and she comes to the hospital out of duty and horror. It is not clear if her marriage will survive.
In the final scene, Matt and his daughters are in a little boat off Waikiki where they spread Elizabeth's ashes.