Raising Lazarus: A Memoir - Softcover

Robert Jon Pensack; Williams, Dwight Arnan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0595349528 ISBN 13: 9780595349524

Publisher: iUniverse, 2005

Synopsis

Raising Lazarus is Dr. Robert Pensack's personal memoir of his battle to maintain his sanity in the face of extraordinary suffering.Dr. Pensack's story chronicles his near life-long struggle with a mortal illness, Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy, or HCM (formally known as IHSS), a genetic illness marked by abnormality of the heart muscle. After the disease claimed the life of his young mother, the adolescent Pensack-and his brother Richard, who also suffered from HCM-went on to become chronic-research heart patients at The National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. They endured a litany of surgeries and multiple near-death experiences caused by cardiac arrests until, thirty years later, both received heart transplants that saved their lives. Remarkably-and coincidentally-Dr. Pensack played a vital role in the evolution of organ transplantation and in his own survival, helping to produce one of the anti-rejection drugs with which he himself was later treated at the time of his greatest need.From recounting his feeling of being condemned to an existence laden with insufferable burden to the hope restored through the ultimate gift of life, Raising Lazarus is Dr. Pensack's inspirational story of survival and triumph.

About this title

About the Author:

New Jersey native Dr. Robert Pensack is a physician, psychiatrist, former general practitioner, and emergency room doctor. He received his Bachelor of Arts and Medical degrees from the University of Colorado and lives with his family in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.

Dwight Arnan Williams is a critically acclaimed author of several works of nonfiction and fiction. He resides in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.

From Kirkus Reviews:

The haunting story of a man's struggle to survive with a terribly damaged heart. As a youngster, Pensack was diagnosed with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a progressive disease of the heart muscle and a condition that had killed his mother when he was only five. Assisted here by Williams, a skilled writer, Pensack reveals how his condition has shaped his life from the day of his mother's death to his recent heart transplant at the age of 42. Opening with a harrowing scene in which he very nearly died on his kitchen floor in front of his own three-year-old son, Pensack's story is given immediacy by being told in the first person and the present tense, and it is given impact by the frankness with which he shares the intimate details of the trauma he suffered not only in body but in spirit. As a young man, he imagined that if he could become a doctor he would somehow be able to cure himself, and he set about learning everything he could about his heart condition. In medical school, however, he found himself identifying not with doctors but with corpses and patients. His repeated brushes with death unhinged him emotionally, leaving him at times terrified, isolated, out of touch with reality, and virtually unable to function. Pensack recounts how he eventually came to recognize the symptoms of post-traumatic-stress disorder and to understand that, for him, a particularly severe level of stress would always be a fact of life. When he finally did become a doctor, he chose not cardiology but psychiatry. Pensack's story is filled with vivid descriptions of clinical procedures performed on his body, but more memorable is what he reveals about how living close to death affects the mind. Packs a powerful punch. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: iUniverse
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0595349528
• ISBN 13: 9780595349524
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 348