Fragile Lives: A Heart Surgeon’s Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table. Stephen Westaby
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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
FIRST EDITION
© Stephen Westaby 2017
Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017
Cover photograph © Shutterstock.com
Text illustrations © Dee McLean
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008196783
Ebook edition: February 2017 ISBN: 9780008196776
Version: 2017-12-02
This book is dedicated to my wonderful children Gemma and Mark, and to my granddaughters Alice and Chloe.
contents
Woody Allen famously said, ‘The brain is my second favourite organ.’ I had the same affinity with the heart. I liked to watch it, stop it, repair it and start it up again, like a mechanic tinkering with an engine beneath the bonnet of a car. When I finally understood how it worked, the rest just followed on. After all, in my younger days I’d been an artist. I simply shifted from brush on canvas to scalpel through human flesh. More hobby than job, and more pleasure than chore, it was simply something I was good at.
My career followed a curiously erratic course, from self-effacing schoolboy to wildly extrovert medical student, from ruthlessly ambitious young doctor to introverted surgical pioneer and teacher. Throughout this journey I was repeatedly asked what I found so compelling about cardiac surgery. I hope the following pages will make that clear.
But before launching into the action let me share with you some facts about this vibrant organ. Every heart is different. Some are fat, some are lean. Some are thick, some are thin. Some are fast, some are slow. Just never the same. Most of the 12,000 that I’ve worked on have been desperately sick, causing misery, crushing chest pain, interminable fatigue and terrifying breathlessness.
What’s so fascinating about the human heart is its movement – the rhythm and