Customer Reviews

Near Misses in Cardiac Surgery

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4 star:		(1)
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An extremely informative and engaging read. The author's style and rhetoric add to the atmosphere of being the primary cardiac surgeon facing a new challenge on each page, and subsequently working toward a solution in a step-wise and logical manner.

I would highly recommend this book to trainee surgeons who are revising for their final examinations and those about to embark on a career in the cardiac operating room.

A book which is a pure delight for the clinician. The joy of this book is that the problems are not easy and the solutions are not obvious. What this little gem of a book can do is to help anesthesiologists to mentally prepare for the next "near-misses" in cardiac anesthesia.

Every surgeon, perhaps every doctor should read this book. It will scare the daylights out of lay people, and surgeons will realize their worst fears are just a narrow margin away from reality. The bain of modern medical and surgical practice to-day are the HMO's and "Managed Care". When one ruling stated the pre-op evaluation by a medical practitioner sufficed and would not permit a pre-op visit to a member of the surgical team, cardiac bypass surgery proceeded, the chest was opened, and the second team responsible for harvesting a donor vein from the leg found it was not possible as the veins had been stripped in a prior operation for varicose veins.

After retiring from my practice of orthopaedic surgery, I had a recurring nightmare. Our hospital, non-profit for its' 75 year existence, was sold to a profit-making corporation. In my dream, I was in the operating room in the midst of a total hip replacement surgery. The head of the femur had been removed, the femoral shaft reamed and prepared to receive the implants. I asked the OR nurse for the total hip components and was annoyed when she handed me implants for a total knee replacement. "NO, NO!", I said. "This is a THR. Give me the hip implants!!!" The nurse replied, "Administration says we can't have any more hip components until we use up all the surplus knee implants."

It took two to three years before this nightmare became a joke that no longer awakened me in a cold sweat. Yes, a joke, but all too close to the reality medical practitioners face to-day.

Cardiac surgeon Myles Lee, M.D. does a superb job reporting "Near Misses" in the operating room when life and death hung in the balance. I shuddered with him through every case. Well worth the read.

andre645

This was a superior book - loved the scenarios and then the note of what really was happening.