Good surgical drama

Walk on Water
by Michael Ruhlman

Despite his overuse of the 'Walk on Water' epithet, Michael Ruhlman's depiction of  Dr. Roger Mee and other surgeons who reconnect, reroute, and sometimes reconstruct the delicate arteries and veins of children's hearts makes for absorbing reading. Heart defects in newborns and young children are much more common than I ever knew--the statistic I looked up says that heart defects within four weeks of birth cause about 303,000 deaths each year worldwide.  But when I tried to check this statistic, I found confusing supporting evidence--there are about 129,000,000 children born every year and between .8 and 1.2 percent of them have congenital heart disease, so this would be a total of about one million cases per year.  Of course, they might not all die, but the numbers look wrong.

In any event, it's common enough to keep a lot of good surgeons very, very busy.  But it appears that there are a lot of not-so-good surgeons, too--or rather, not-so-good surgery centers.  If you're expecting a baby and any sort of defect is suspected, it might be worthwhile researching your options ahead of time.

But the focus of this book is the great surgeons.  It is full of miracle stories and other suspenseful and somewhat agonizing feats of near-magic in the operating theater.  Maybe it's not the full story, but it's a good one.