Fragile Lives: A Heart Surgeon’s Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table

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Stephen Westaby. Fragile Lives: A Heart Surgeon’s Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table

copyright

dedication

contents

foreword

the ether dome

humble beginnings

lord brock’s boots

township boy

the girl with no name

the man with two hearts

saving julie’s heart

the black banana

domino heart

life on a battery

anna’s story

mr clarke

adrenaline rush

despair

double jeopardy

your life in their hands

afterword

acknowledgements

glossary

about the publisher

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Title Page

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Now there were just the two of us left, the corpse and me. The operating lights still shone on her face and she was staring straight up at me. Why hadn’t they closed her eyelids like they did in the movies? I could see through those dilated pupils to the pain etched on her brain.

From fragments of conversation I’d overheard and with just a little medical knowledge I could sketch her life story. She was in her twenties. Born in the East End. She could only have been a small child when her parents were killed in the bombing. As a child she carried the scars of those sights and sounds, the fear of being alone as her world disintegrated. Brought up in poverty, she develops rheumatic fever, a simple streptococcal sore throat that triggers a devastating inflammatory process. Rheumatic fever was common in areas of deprivation and overcrowding. Perhaps she had painful, swollen joints for a few weeks. What she doesn’t know is that the same inflammation is in her heart valves. There was no diagnostic test in those days.

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