Open Heart: A Cardiac Surgeon's Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table

In gripping prose, one of the world's leading cardiac surgeons lays bare both the wonder and the horror of a life spent a heartbeat away from death
When Stephen Westaby witnessed a patient die on the table during open-heart surgery for the first time, he was struck by the quiet, determined way the surgeons walked away. As he soon understood, this detachment is a crucial survival strategy in a profession where death is only a heartbeat away. In Open Heart, Westaby reflects on over 11,000 surgeries, showing us why the procedures have never become routine and will never be. With astonishing compassion, he recounts harrowing and sometimes hopeful stories from his operating room: we meet a pulseless man who lives with an electric heart pump, an expecting mother who refuses surgery unless the doctors let her pregnancy reach full term, and a baby who gets a heart transplant-only to die once it's in place.
For readers of Atul Gawande's Being Mortal and of Henry Marsh's Do No Harm, Open Heart offers a soul-baring account of a life spent in constant confrontation with death.

• The Matter of the Heart: A History of the Heart in Eleven Operations
• Admissions: Life as a Brain Surgeon
• Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery
• The Heart Healers: The Misfits, Mavericks, and Rebels Who Created the Greatest Medical Breakthrough of Our Lives
• 100,000 Hearts: A Surgeon's Memoir
• Healing Children: A Surgeon's Stories from the Frontiers of Pediatric Medicine
• Confessions of a Surgeon: The Good, the Bad, and the Complicated...Life Behind the O.R. Doors
• Trauma Room Two
• Hundreds of Interlaced Fingers: A Kidney Doctor's Search for the Perfect Match
• Fragile Lives: A Heart Surgeon's Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table