DEATH INTERRUPTED

Doctors today can call on previously unimaginable technologies to help keep our bodies alive. In this new era, most organs can be kept from dying almost indefinitely by machines. But this unprecedented shift in end-of-life care has created a major crisis. In the widening grey zone between life and death, doctors fight with doctors, families feel pressured to make tough decisions about their loved ones, and lawyers are left to argue life-and-death cases in the courts. Meanwhile, intensive care patients are caught in purgatory, attached to machines and unable to speak for themselves.

In DEATH INTERRUPTED, Dr. Blair Bigham shares how his career from helicopter paramedic to ER and ICU attending physician led him to question the very definition of death. Through conversations with historians, ethicists, social workers, and palliative care doctors, Bigham exposes the tensions inherent in this new era of dying and answers the tough questions facing us all. Because now, for the first time in human history, we may be able to choose how our own story ends.

Bigham crafts a truly fascinating narrative of his quest to understand the meaning of life and death. This will appeal to general nonfiction readers, those who've faced these tough decisions in their own families, as well as anyone interested in the “death acceptance” movement -- such as Caitlin Doughty's New York Times bestseller Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematorium (W.W. Norton, 2014) and her wildly popular “Ask a Mortician” YouTube series.

DR. BLAIR BIGHAM is a journalist, scientist, and attending emergency and ICU physician who trained at McMaster and Stanford Universities. He was a Global Journalism Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and an associate scientist at St. Michael's Hospital. His work has appeared in the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Canadian Medical Association Journal, among others.