Audiobook8 hours
When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales from Neurosurgery
Written by Frank T. Vertosick, Jr., MD
Narrated by Kirby Heyborne
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
With poignant insight and humor, Frank Vertosick, Jr., MD, describes some of the greatest challenges of his career, including a six-week-old infant with a tumor in her brain, a young man struck down in his prime by paraplegia, and a minister with a .22-caliber bullet lodged in his skull. Told through intimate portraits of Vertosick's patients and unsparing yet fascinatingly detailed descriptions of surgical procedures, When the Air Hits Your Brain-the culmination of decades spent struggling to learn an unforgiving craft-illuminates both the mysteries of the mind and the realities of the operating room.
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Reviews for When the Air Hits Your Brain
Rating: 4.49802366403162 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
253 ratings16 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wonderfully engaging, terrifying at times, funny sometimes, and absolutely illuminating even if you have no background in biology or human anatomy.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Enthralling, some of the medical treatments are a little dated, naturally, it was published several years ago, But extremely well written and narrator was fantastic! Very moving at times and highly engaging!
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Couldn't stop listening. The author is an incredibly literate and convincing writer. This is mostly a story about people - the residents, patients and their family members. While the writing is phenomenal, the stories are just about the roughest thing I've ever heard. Can't remember being more deeply affected by anything. Highly recommend if you can stomach it.
The audio performance is subtle and matches very well with the text and character of the author. I'll be on the lookout for his recordings.1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Loved it tons! I recommend this book to everyone, especially to my fellow HSE practitioners.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A recount of the life of a student becoming a neurosurgeon. It is entertaining and has a good flow which makes it easy to read.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Descriptive of about ten cases chronological with learning the craft.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Extremely well written experiences from the operating room. For the layman a peak in to life of a neurosurgeon.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This audiobook shed light on medical and surgical procedure employed in curing or treating brain and spinal dysfunction/diseases. It revealed the human relationships developed during the author’s career as a neurological surgeon. Medical information, training protocol, stressful rotations within the years of training, the reward of returning a patient to their life, coping with the death of a patient and other emotional patient cases, were frankly shared. I found it a fascinating read.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I enjoyed thoroughly this book. Thank you for writing it.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A decent story of the author's neurosurgery residency. It starts out extremely stilted, like bad fiction, with in the made-up dialog the other characters conveniently explaining for us each acronym and procedure as it arises. But it gets better, and even achieves some emotional heft by the end. I think "Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery," by Henry Marsh, is probably still the better book—more honest—but this does have some very good descriptions of cases and surgeries. (Vertosick makes a number of mistakes when talking about science beyond neurosurgery, but as far as I can tell he is accurate within his specialty.)
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This was an engaging memoir of the medical school and training experiences, from internship to fellowships, of the author on his journey to become a neurosurgeon. It includes some fascinating case histories, but mostly focuses on the author's evolving relationship with and attitude towards his patients.When he began training, he would find himself emotionally touched by his patients. Then, "Trauma experiences hardened me to death and pain patients made me cynical about suffering. I felt my personality shifting away during this arduous process of becoming 'one of them.' Clinical cases no longer evoked the strong emotions they once had."*****************"Yet my emotional numbness was still only partial. I still hadn't progressed to the status of true surgical psychopath, wherein one's humanity is placed under general anesthesia."He also discusses the mistakes made and the effect they had on him in his training. At a certain point, as he became more skilled, he learned he had to guard against overconfidence:"Before reaching my surgical adulthood, I would again stumble into the inferno of overconfidence. And come perilously close to emotional incineration."Ultimately (thankfully), the author came to the conclusion that "surgical psychopathy" was not the best way to handle the difficulties of his profession. He learned that some caring is a necessary element to be a good surgeon.I enjoyed this book, focusing as it does on the emotional development of a surgeon. I recommend it if this sounds interesting to you.3 1/2 stars
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A short medical memoir, not the kind of book I normally read, but I found it in Foyles when I was browsing in the medical section and dipped into it and enjoyed what I found. I felt the author was being very honest about his profession and specialism, and would love to meet him, since a neurosurgeon who has insight into his own potential arrogance is, as he himself writes, a rarity.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is a fascinating and emotionally frank collection of stories taken from the author's professional life, from the humble beginnings of a Neurosurgery resident to the humbling culmination of a Neurosurgeon. I especially appreciate how he doesn't avoid those cases that had a less than great ending and that he recognizes how much you can learn from failure. Anyone with an interest in Neurosurgery should read this, not only because of Vertosick's talent as a story-teller, but because of his honesty when it comes to patients, his sense of humor regarding this very serious topic, and his seemingly unending passion for that lump in our head which is the brain.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5My post-surgery review meeting (for 2 craniotomies), was with Mark Wilson, my Specialist Registrar. He recommended this book to me. I purposely held off getting the book as I knew some of the content was going to be difficult for me to cope with. After a couple of months of the title sitting on my to-do list, I had to order it. I was right, it is a gut wrenching book, it's also very, very good and I recommend it to you, if you have a passing interest in your 'wetware'.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Dr. Vertosick provides a very lively and personal account of his neurosurgery career. He has a very good sense of humour, while trying to correct some TV-induced wrong assumptions about the medical field he doesn't hesitate to talk about how he received some little but critical help from a patient who watched some medical TV series :)He describes his transition from being a very young student of medicine, to becoming an assistant at the world's best neurosurgery department, and finally to becoming an expert neurosurgeon under the supervision of another very disciplined and famous expert doctor. While doing that he helps the reader see the intricacies and beauty of that small, fatty, bloody tissue which makes us what we are: the brain.After all the difficult cases he describes I truly believe that one has to be really crazy to become a neurosurgeon and operate on brain, or really love that field of study (maybe both). Dr. Vertosick made me realize once again what a miraculous thing that brain of ours is.As a book of popular science I can compare the quality and smoothness of narration to one of my favorite authors, Oliver Sacks.PS: It was nice to see the name of a Turkish neurosurgeon Prof. Dr. Gazi Yaşargil in the book, too.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is an excellent collection of medical stories from the author's years of training to be a neurosurgeon. They are told with extreme compassion, and include his private doubts about whether this was the right career for him, even after all the time and effort spent to attain his goals.