CONNECTIONS: HUMAN STORIES AT THE EDGE OF MEDICINE

Modern medicine is a world that glimmers with promising technology and cutting edge research. We are living longer and longer, but at what cost? We are now so good at saving patients' lives, but what do those lives look like outside of the hospital's walls?

Dr. Daniela Lamas aims to address these questions through stories from her own experience in critical care, and to ask whether we should change the model of medicine to bring down the wall between doctors and patients, at least to some degree. To the public, the stories begin with sirens and culminate in survival and death. But these are only the most visible narratives. As a critical care doctor treating people at their sickest in twelve-hour increments, Dr. Daniela Lamas is fascinated by a different story - what is life like for the people who survive?

CONNECTIONS: HUMAN STORIES AT THE EDGE OF MEDICINE, begins with Lamas's memories of medical internship, when she replies to a Facebook friend request from a dying patient and became captivated by his photos of life before illness. From that starting point, Dr. Lamas takes readers on a journey through the nether regions between sickness and health: men and women living with partial artificial hearts who must plug themselves into a wall socket each night; kidney transplant recipients who navigate life-long relationships with organ donors they found on Facebook; and young adults with cystic fibrosis who survive to adulthoods they didn't think they would see. These are just some of the narratives of the people who come out the other side.

CONNECTIONS will appeal to readers who are fascinated by medical advance, but, more broadly, the book should be read by anyone who is curious about the grey areas in medicine and the nuances of life after survival - readers who are willing to see the uncertainty, humanity and ultimately the great promise at the edge of modern medicine.

Dr.Lamas belongs to that rare breed of wonderful, compassionate doctors-who-can-write. She has just the right resume: She is currently a Pulmonary and Critical Care Fellow at Harvard, where she works for Atul Gawande at Ariadne Labs. She's in the process of opening up a post-critical-care clinic. She has also worked on the ABC News Medical Unit, led by Dr. Richard Besser. As a writer, she has been published in newyorker.com, the NYT, Boston Globe, and Atlantic. We met with her in our offices and she's quite impressive--young, passionate, smart, and we think she's at the beginning of a long career as a doctor-writer.