Open Heart

Starred review from April 24, 2017
Pioneering English heart surgeon Westaby champions the extraordinary accomplishments of artificial heart technology in his dazzling memoir. He chronicles his own swashbuckling role in advancing their use, reflecting on a few of the 12,000 “desperately sick” patients for whom he refused to give up hope. They include Julie, a 21-year-old student-teacher for whom an implanted device marked the start of an alternative treatment to a heart transplant; 10-year-old Stephan, whose Berlin Heart device kept him alive until a donor heart was found; 58-year-old Peter, whose eight years of life with a “Jarvik 2000” mechanical heart proved “that extra life is not ordinary life”; and six-month-old Kristy, whose failing heart was “reconfigured,” in the process demonstrating that an infant’s cardiac stem cells can regenerate heart muscle. Westaby energetically details these life-and-death battles, conceding that he follows the advice of his hero, Winston Churchill: “Never surrender.” Westaby grew up poor and decided to become a heart surgeon at age seven after watching American doctors on TV close a hole in someone’s heart. After witnessing a catastrophic and haunting operation as a med student, he realized that “it is tomorrow that matters.” For this trailblazing surgeon, saving lives means keeping an unflinching eye on the future. Agent: George Lucas, InkWell.

Starred review from May 1, 2017
A first-rate memoir from a British heart surgeon.Westaby, a consultant cardiac surgeon at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, credits his grandfather for teaching him how to paint--for "connecting his hand to his brain" when he was a child---but seeing his painful deterioration from heart failure inspired the author's pursuit of heart surgery--that and a mid-1950s American TV show featuring heart operations. So it was that the dirt-poor boy from a steel town outside of London made it to Charing Cross Hospital Medical School and on to a distinguished career. Following brief biographical chapters and some helpful heart anatomy lessons, the text is a series of you-are-there accounts of Westaby working in operating rooms around the world. In spare prose, he describes what he and his surgical team do to close a congenital hole in an infant's heart, repair a mitral valve, transplant a donor heart, or implant an artificial one in the form of a ventricular assist pump. Readers will not soon forget the author's stories about a baby in dire need of surgery to remove a heart tumor or the gang member stabbed close to his heart. Despite the cool detachment espoused by specialists engaged in daily life-or-death battles, Westaby comes across as caring and compassionate. This also manifests in his inveighing against Britain's National Health Service for not covering costly but lifesaving pumps. (Many of the pumps Westaby implanted were paid for by private charities.) The NHS also insists that heart surgeons' success and failure rates be published, which, since heart surgery is inherently hazardous, Westaby sees as an excellent way to discourage future practitioners. Indeed, his own accounts do not always end happily. Now, following thousands of surgeries, the author's hand is permanently disfigured, and he no longer operates. He continues as a consultant, recognized for developing new surgical techniques and advancing artificial heart technology. Not without some gore but required reading for medical students and hospital-show junkies but also for anyone curious to learn about hearts and the heroic measures to save them.

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May 15, 2017
Legendary heart surgeon Denton Cooley reasoned, A successful cardiac surgeon is a man who, when asked to identify the three best surgeons in the world, has difficulty in naming the other two. British cardiac surgeon Westaby balances lofty confidence with an understanding of grim reality. He has performed 12,000 heart operations and been involved in groundbreaking artificial-heart technologies, but he confesses that despite my best efforts, some patients took the fast track to Heaven. His estimate is more than 300. This memoir incorporates recollections of challenging cases and vivid descriptions of operations. Clinical encounters include a pregnant woman with severe valvular disease (aortic stenosis), a boy whose heart was on the wrong side of his chest (situs inversus), implantation of a mechanical heart, and a young woman with a benign cardiac tumor (myxoma) who undergoes five operations. Westaby provides a peek into the mind of a surgeon immunity to stress, an ability to take risks, the loss of empathy, fueled by chronic sleep deprivation. Intense and sometimes-stunning stories of the heart, delivered from the heart.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)