Dr. Keith Black is one of the foremost brain surgeons in the country today, and his help is sought by many people for their brain tumors. In his career, he has gone from someone who was seen as less than intelligent simply because of the color of his skin, to one of the most respected surgeons out there in America. Even people from other countries travel to see him and have him work on their brain tumors. This is his story, and his thoughts on what he has seen and experienced.
He started out as a small-town boy, but both his parents sacrificed a great deal to ensure the quality of his education, which, as a black growing up in the deep south, was often inferior to the quality of white schools in the same area. His parents, both educators themselves, moved north so that he could go to better and more prestigious schools. Early on, he was interested in science and animals and gravitated to medicine. But eventually, when he was in college, he settled on surgery as his career.
In his first job in a hospital, he was under a doctor who believed he wasn't as intelligent as a white man would be. He'd never really run into that attitude before. The first time it happened, he let it go by, but before his second time with that Doctor, he printed out all the things the Doctor had gotten wrong the first time out of peer review literature, and proceeded to show him repeatedly wrong before his own colleagues out of the literature the man should have read and known, which shut the surgeon up most effectively.
After that, he became a brain surgeon, and did a lot of surgeries, which he believes is important to becoming the best at ones job. After a time of being a surgeon, he wanted to do research as well, which led him to take a job with Cedars-Sinai, who built a brain center for him, and that is where he still works today.
In this book, Dr. Black examines some of his patients: a Hong Kong entepreneur and his sons, an Irish Man whose tumor was so far advanced that he was forced to breathe through a tube, to a racecar driver with the worst kind of tumor: a Gliobastoma Multiforme, and follows them through their surgeries and the aftermath. Not all of them survive, but thanks to Dr. Black and the doctors who work with them, we may one day make some of these tumors much more surviveable.
Reading this book was amazing. It caught my interest right away, being similar to a book I read last year, called, "Another Day in the Frontal Lobe", but also different, because Dr. Black's experience as a surgeon was different from that of Katrina Firlik.
As always with these sorts of books, it's not the surgical terminologies you remember most, but the patients themselves. Mr. Tao, Elishadie Tezera, and Tionne Watkins, plus the others, all become more important in your mind than the details of their surgeries.
Dr. Watkins makes his patients human, and presents his own findings and feelings in a sympathetic way that makes the book linger in your mind for long after you've finished reading it. And anyone needing brain surgery to remove a tumor could certainly do worse than Dr. Black. He's a skilled and caring man and will do his best to save you... and his best is very, very good indeed.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment