You Can Stop Humming Now: A Doctor's Stories of Life, Death, and in Between

"Gripping, soaring, inspiring."--Atul Gawande, author of Being Mortal

For readers of Atul Gawande and Jerome Groopman, a book of beautifully crafted stories about what life is like for patients kept alive by modern medical technology.

Modern medicine is a world that glimmers with new technology and cutting-edge research. To the public eye, medical stories often begin with sirens and flashing lights and culminate in survival or death. But these are only the most visible narratives. As a critical care doctor treating people at their sickest, Daniela Lamas is fascinated by a different story: what comes after for those whose lives are extended by days, months, or years as a result of our treatments and technologies?

In You Can Stop Humming Now, Lamas explores the complex answers to this question through intimate accounts of patients and their families. A grandfather whose failing heart has been replaced by a battery-operated pump; a salesman who found himself a kidney donor on social media; a college student who survived a near fatal overdose and returned home, alive but not the same; and a young woman navigating an adulthood she never thought she'd live to see -- these moving narratives paint a detailed picture of the fragile border between sickness and health.

Riveting, gorgeously told, and deeply personal, You Can Stop Humming Now is a compassionate, uncompromising look at the choices and realities that many of us, and our families, may one day face.

• In Shock: My Journey from Death to Recovery and the Redemptive Power of Hope
• Letters from the Pit: Stories of a Physician's Odyssey in Emergency Medicine
• That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour
• When Death Becomes Life: Notes from a Transplant Surgeon
• Tears of Salt: A Doctor's Story of the Refugee Crisis
• Diagnosis: Solving the Most Baffling Medical Mysteries
• Patient Care: Death and Life in the Emergency Room
• Extreme Measures: Finding a Better Path to the End of Life
• Final Exam
• Internal Medicine: A Doctor's Stories