Every Deep-Drawn Breath:
an intensive-care doctor’s notes on healing
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Every Deep-Drawn Breath:
an intensive-care doctor’s notes on healing
Overview
A world-renowned critical-care doctor offers hope for patients, their families, and the future of medicine in this timely, urgent, and compassionate work about the devastating and little-known physical and emotional effects of ICU stays.
As COVID-19 survivors are discharged from hospitals, grateful to be alive, most don’t realise that the hardest part of their battle may be about to begin. Many will return home and struggle with long-term physical, mental, and emotional problems either caused or exacerbated by the life-saving treatment they received in intensive care. They’ll join the ranks of critical-care survivors whose lives are completely upturned by a hospital stay. More than half of the patients admitted to ICUs will struggle with post–intensive care syndrome, which can include Alzheimer’s-like cognitive deficits, PTSD, muscle and nerve damage, and depression. Their personal and professional lives can suffer irreparably. Worst of all, no one seems to understand that they have an illness at all. Not even their doctors.
Dr Ely is now a leader in the field of ICU survivorship — advocating for compassionate care in the technology-driven enclave of the modern ICU — especially relevant during the coronavirus pandemic. In Every Deep-Drawn Breath, Dr Ely sounds a warning for the millions of people who will be admitted to ICUs in coming years and a wake-up call for healthcare professionals — himself included — to turn their gaze from the latest life-saving machines to really see, as he says, ‘the person in the patient’.
Details
- Format
- Size
- Extent
- ISBN
- RRP
- Pub date
- Rights held
- Other rights
- Paperback
- 234mm x 153mm
- 352 pages
- 9781922310644
- AUD$35.00
- 28 September 2021
- UK & CWEALTH (EX. CAN)
- WRITERS HOUSE
Categories
Praise
‘An intensely emotive journey through the science and history of the intensive care unit … Every Deep-Drawn Breath is a paragon of humanity that will have lasting positive effects.’
‘A stunning, heartbreaking, and hopeful book, expressing Dr Ely’s profound union of compassion and medical skill. Given that most of us will stay in an ICU, attend a loved one there, or even die in one, I hope that many readers demand treatment according to the humane practices Dr Ely has pioneered. I equally hope that every critical-care doctor and hospital administrator reads this beautiful book, puts its protocols into practice, and makes their ICUs more humane and medically effective.’
About the Author
E. Wesley Ely, MD, MPH, is a pulmonary and critical care physician who earned his MD at Tulane University School of Medicine, in conjunction with a master’s in public health. He serves as the Grant W. Liddle Endowed Chair in medicine and is a physician-scientist and tenured professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He is also the associate director of ageing research for the Tennessee Valley Veterans Affairs Geriatric Research Education Clinical Center (GRECC). Dr Ely has published studies in the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and The Lancet, and his writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, USA Today, and other publications. He lives in Nashville and is the founder and codirector of the Critical Illness, Brain Dysfunction, and Survivorship (CIBS) Center, an organisation devoted to research and recovery for people affected by critical illness. Dr Ely is donating all his net proceeds from this book to a fund at the CIBS Center established to help ICU survivors and their families. Visit www.icudelirium.org.
