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WORK TITLE: Open Heart
WORK NOTES: pub’d in England as Fragile Lives
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Oxford, England
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Westaby
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born July 27, 1948, in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, England; married; children: one son and one daughter.
EDUCATION:University of London, B.Sc., 1969, M.B.B.S., 1972, M.S., 1986; Royal College of Surgeons, F.R.C.S., 1977; University of Strathclyde, Ph.D., 2002.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of Wales, Swansea, professor, 2005–; Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust, professor and consultant cardiac surgeon. Was also visiting professor at the University of Hong Kong, 2005, and Distinguished Ralph Cicerone Professor, University of California Irvine, California, 2006.
MEMBER:Fellow of the European Board of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgeons; Fellow of the European Society of Cardiology,
AWARDS:Ray C. Fish Award for Scientific Achievement, Texas Heart Institute, 2004.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Stephen Westaby grew up in less-than-rosy circumstances in public housing in a steel town near London, England, and fixed on becoming a heart surgeon when he saw American surgeons perform a lifesaving operation on television. He went on to earn medical degrees at the University of London and the University of Strathclyde, performing some 12,000 heart operations and refining cardiac procedures and technologies during a career that has spanned more than three decades. He has written two books. The Failing Right Heart is an overview aimed at doctors that describes conditions affecting the right side of the heart and their treatment. Westaby’s second book is a memoir, published under the title Fragile Lives: A Heart Surgeon’s Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table in the United Kingdom and as Open Heart: A Cardiac Surgeons Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table in the United States.
Open Heart gathers tales of the treatment of Westaby’s most challenging patients. Yvonne Roberts, in the London Guardian Online, characterized Westaby as “maverick and a hugely innovative pioneer.” Westaby himself admits to a certain addiction to the work. In the book he says, “Cardiac surgery is like quicksand. Once in it you’re sucked deeper and deeper, and I struggled to leave the hospital in case something remarkable happened and I missed it.” Writing in Booklist, Tony Miksanek observed that in Open Heart Westaby “balances lofty confidence with an understanding of grim reality” in what he termed “intense and sometimes-stunning stories.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews hailed the book as a “first-rate memoir.” Westaby describes in “spare prose” a set of “you-are-there accounts” of his experiences in the operating room. The reviewer deemed this “required reading for medical students and hospital-show junkies” and for readers “curious to learn about hearts and the heroic measures to save them.” A Publishers Weekly commentator called Westaby a “trailblazing surgeon” who “champions the extraordinary accomplishments of artificial heart technology in his dazzling memoir.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 15, 2017, Tony Miksanek, review of Open Heart: A Cardiac Surgeon’s Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table, p. 4.
Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2017, review of Open Heart.
Publishers Weekly, April 24, 2017, review of Open Heart, p. 84.
ONLINE
Cambridge News, http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/ (February 10, 2017), Freya Leng, “World-Famous Heart Surgeon Professor Steve Westaby Recalls His Early Days of Training at Addenbrooke’s in His Memoir.”
CTSNet, https://www.ctsnet.org/ (January 8, 2018), author profile.
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (February 13, 2017), Yvonne Roberts, review of Fragile Lives: A Heart Surgeon’s Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table.
Evening Standard Online, https://www.standard.co.uk/ (February 2, 2017), Rosamund Urwin, review of Fragile Lives.
Stephen Westaby is a pioneer in artificial heart technology and serves as Consultant Cardiac Surgeon at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford. He lives in Oxford, UK.
World-famous heart surgeon Professor Steve Westaby recalls his early days of training at Addenbrooke's in his memoir
Professor Steve Westaby trained at both Addenbrooke's and Papworth hospitals
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ByFreya Leng
21:00, 10 FEB 2017
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Professor Steve Westaby has published his new book, Fragile Lives.
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One of the world’s most eminent heart surgeons, who has just published his memoirs, has paid tribute to his days of basic training at Addenbrooke’s.
Professor Steve Westaby, who has carried out 11,000 heart operations in his 35-year career, trained at both Papworth Hospital and Addenbrooke’s as a medical student, and lived in Cambridge in the 1970s.
In his new book, Fragile Lives , the professor shares the most remarkable cases of his career, including ‘the pulseless man’, a woman who lived the nightmare of locked-in syndrome after surgery, and a man whose life was powered by a battery for eight years.
While Prof Westaby has spent much of his career working in Oxford, he fondly remembers the early days of his career in Cambridge.
“Cambridge was a very big part of my career,” he said. “Those days in my training in Cambridge I remember with enormous pleasure. It was that basic training that set me up to go on to be a good heart surgeon.”
Originally from Scunthorpe, Prof Westaby moved to the city when Professor Roy Calne began the liver transplant programme with Professor Roger Williams at King’s College Hospital – and when Sir Terence English was starting heart transplants at Papworth.
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“I used to be in the hospital all day, every day. I did so many operations in Cambridge that gave me a really good start in life,” he said. “They were exciting times.”
Professor Steve Westaby, who has carried out 11,000 heart operations in his 35-year career.
He first set foot in the city when he went for an interview for medical school at one of Cambridge University’s colleges.
But his experience of working in a mortuary and helping with autopsies at his local general hospital during the school holidays shocked those interviewing him.
“I had got used to the very difficult side of anatomy and medicine, so by the time I went to the interview, I could really talk about that sort of thing, and it quite shocked some of the Cambridge dons.”
Prof Westaby decided to become a heart surgeon after watching the TV programme, Your Life in their Hands, which showed American surgeons close a hole in the heart with a heart-lung machine.
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“I was quite captivated as a boy, I never wanted to be a proper doctor, I always wanted to be a heart surgeon,” he said.
Among the stories in the book, Prof Westaby tells of when, as a junior doctor, he went to Addenbrooke’s A&E one day after a misjudged rugby tackle.
(Image: SWNS Group)
But as he was waiting for treatment, a young motorbike accident victim was brought in, bleeding in the chest. Still in his rugby kit and covered in mud, Prof Westaby operated on the young man, saving his life.
“There was no time to call the chest surgeons from Papworth Hospital, so the casualty officer and nursing sister asked me to intervene,” he wrote. “I opened him up while I was in shorts with muddy knees, spitting out my own blood in the scrub sink. This bizarre story went viral”.
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Prof Westaby, who is renowned as the first surgeon to have fitted a patient with a new type of artificial heart, added: “For me, Addenbrooke’s is still the best hospital in the country. When Papworth actually transfers to Addenbrooke’s, so you’ve got everything on one site, it will be absolutely terrific.”
Fragile Lives , by Professor Steve Westaby, published by HarperCollins, is on sale in hardback for £14.99.
Stephen Westaby, BSc, MS, PhD
Oxford Heart Centre, John Radcliffe Hospital
John Radcliffe Hospital
Oxford 0X9 3DU
United Kingdom
44 (0) 1865-220269
44 (0) 1865-220268 (fax)
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Role:
Surgeon
Background
BSc (Hons) Biochemistry - University of London (1969)
MB. BS. - University of London (1972); FRCS London (1977)
Research Fellowship with Drs Kirklin and Blackstone - University of Alabama (1982)
MS. - University of London (1986)
FETCS (2000); FESC (2002); FICA -Honorary Fellow- (2005)
PhD Bioengineering - University of Strathclyde (2002)
Ray C. Fish Award for Scientific Achievement - Texas Heart Institute (2004)
Professor of Biomedical Engineering University of Wales, Swansea (since 2005)
Visiting Professor University of Hong Kong (2005)
Distinguished Ralph Cicerone Professor - University of California Irvine (2006)
Interests
Heart failure surgery
Developement of circulatory support system
Surgery of the thoracic aorta
History of cardiac surgery
Achieved 7.5 year LVAD survival (Jarvik 2000)
Congenital heart disease
Lowest reported Type A dissection mortality (6% over 10 yrs)
Printer-friendly
Content Published on CTSNet
Postoperative Mechanical Circulatory Support
Stephen Westaby: A Life of Innovation in Cardiac Surgery and Beyond
Debate: Surgeon-Specific Outcomes Reporting
View all articles by this author
Practice Areas
Pediatric Cardiac Surgery
Adult Cardiac Surgery
Organizations
American Association for Thoracic Surgery
Cardiothoracic Surgery Network
European Association for Cardio-Thoracic Surgery
Society for Cardiothoracic Surgery in Great Britain and Ireland
The Society of Thoracic Surgeons
Stephen Westaby
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Professor Stephen Westaby FRCS (born 27 July 1948) is a British heart surgeon at John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, England.[1] He won the award of Midlander of the Year in 2002.
Contents [hide]
1
Early life
2
Career
3
Personal life
4
References
Early life[edit]
He attended Henderson Avenue Junior School and Scunthorpe Grammar School (High Ridge School from 1968). He went to Charing Cross Hospital Medical School.
Career[edit]
Westaby and his team performed Peter Houghton's heart operation in June 2000, implanting a Jarvik 7 artificial left ventricular assist device, a turbine pump. Peter Houghton (1938–2007) became the longest living person with an electric heart pump in the world.[2][3]
His memoir of his career as a heart surgeon, Fragile Lives: A Heart Surgeon’s Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table, was published in 2017 by HarperCollins.[4]
Personal life[edit]
He is married with one son and one daughter.
Open Heart: A Cardiac Surgeon's Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table
Tony Miksanek
113.18 (May 15, 2017): p4.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Open Heart: A Cardiac Surgeon's Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table. By Stephen Westaby. June 2017.304p. Basic, $27 (9780465094837); e-book (9780465094844). 617.4.
Legendary heart surgeon Denton Cooley reasoned, "A successful cardiac surgeon is a man who, when asked to identify the three best surgeons in the world, has difficulty in naming the other two." British cardiac surgeon Westaby balances lofty confidence with an understanding of grim reality. He has performed 12,000 heart operations and been involved in groundbreaking artificial-heart technologies, but he confesses that "despite my best efforts, some patients took the fast track to Heaven." His estimate is more than 300. This memoir incorporates recollections of challenging cases and vivid descriptions of operations. Clinical encounters include a pregnant woman with severe valvular disease (aortic stenosis), a boy whose heart was on the wrong side of his chest (situs inversus), implantation of a mechanical heart, and a young woman with a benign cardiac tumor (myxoma) who undergoes five operations. Westaby provides a peek into the mind of a surgeon-"immunity to stress, an ability to take risks, the loss of empathy," fueled by chronic sleep deprivation. Intense and sometimes-stunning stories of the heart, delivered from the heart. -Tony Miksanek
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Miksanek, Tony. "Open Heart: A Cardiac Surgeon's Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table." Booklist, 15 May 2017, p. 4. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A496084674/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b6ac061d. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A496084674
Westaby, Stephen: OPEN HEART
(May 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Westaby, Stephen OPEN HEART Basic (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 6, 20 ISBN: 978-0-465-09483-7
A first-rate memoir from a British heart surgeon.Westaby, a consultant cardiac surgeon at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, credits his grandfather for teaching him how to paint--for "connecting his hand to his brain" when he was a child---but seeing his painful deterioration from heart failure inspired the author's pursuit of heart surgery--that and a mid-1950s American TV show featuring heart operations. So it was that the dirt-poor boy from a steel town outside of London made it to Charing Cross Hospital Medical School and on to a distinguished career. Following brief biographical chapters and some helpful heart anatomy lessons, the text is a series of you-are-there accounts of Westaby working in operating rooms around the world. In spare prose, he describes what he and his surgical team do to close a congenital hole in an infant's heart, repair a mitral valve, transplant a donor heart, or implant an artificial one in the form of a ventricular assist pump. Readers will not soon forget the author's stories about a baby in dire need of surgery to remove a heart tumor or the gang member stabbed close to his heart. Despite the cool detachment espoused by specialists engaged in daily life-or-death battles, Westaby comes across as caring and compassionate. This also manifests in his inveighing against Britain's National Health Service for not covering costly but lifesaving pumps. (Many of the pumps Westaby implanted were paid for by private charities.) The NHS also insists that heart surgeons' success and failure rates be published, which, since heart surgery is inherently hazardous, Westaby sees as an excellent way to discourage future practitioners. Indeed, his own accounts do not always end happily. Now, following thousands of surgeries, the author's hand is permanently disfigured, and he no longer operates. He continues as a consultant, recognized for developing new surgical techniques and advancing artificial heart technology. Not without some gore but required reading for medical students and hospital-show junkies but also for anyone curious to learn about hearts and the heroic measures to save them.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Westaby, Stephen: OPEN HEART." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491002750/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=54aa893f. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491002750
Open Heart: A Cardiac Surgeon's Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table
264.17 (Apr. 24, 2017): p84.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
* Open Heart: A Cardiac Surgeon's Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table
Stephen Westaby. Basic, $27 (304p)
ISBN 978-0-465-09483-7
Pioneering English heart surgeon Westaby champions the extraordinary accomplishments of artificial heart technology in his dazzling memoir. He chronicles his own swashbuckling role in advancing their use, reflecting on a few of the 12,000 "desperately sick" patients for whom he refused to give up hope. They include Julie, a 21-year-old student-teacher for whom an implanted device marked the start of an alternative treatment to a heart transplant; 10-year-old Stephan, whose Berlin Heart device kept him alive until a donor heart was found; 58-year-old Peter, whose eight years of life with a "Jarvik 2000" mechanical heart proved "that extra life is not ordinary life"; and six-month-old Kristy, whose failing heart was "reconfigured," in the process demonstrating that an infant's cardiac stem cells can regenerate heart muscle. Westaby energetically details these life-and-death battles, conceding that he follows the advice of his hero, Winston Churchill: "Never-surrender." Westaby grew up poor and decided to become a heart surgeon at age seven after watching American doctors on TV close a hole in someone's heart. After witnessing a catastrophic and haunting operation as a med student, he realized that "it is tomorrow that matters." For this trailblazing surgeon, saving lives means keeping an unflinching eye on the future. Agent: George Lucas, Ink Well. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Open Heart: A Cardiac Surgeon's Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table." Publishers Weekly, 24 Apr. 2017, p. 84. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491250871/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=14d0df5d. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491250871
Fragile Lives by Stephen Westaby; Emergency Admissions by Kit Wharton – review
Powerful memoirs by a heart surgeon and an ambulance driver tackle the ‘live or let die’ dilemma of modern healthcare
Stephen Westaby: the ‘back-street boy’ who became a leading heart surgeon and innovative pioneer.
Yvonne Roberts
Monday 13 February 2017 07.30 GMT
Last modified on Saturday 2 December 2017 15.21 GMT
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rofessor Stephen Westaby is, according to his own description, “an ambitious bastard” who suffers from an irritable bladder. He is also a maverick and a hugely innovative pioneer, internationally renowned as a heart surgeon who has helped to develop and refine the use of heart pumps, artificial hearts and circulatory support technology to drive blood around the body.
He wants these deployed not just as a temporary measure prior to a transplant, but to give an ailing heart time to recover or to provide an alternative to death when a patient is “walking dead” – refused a place on the transplant waiting list, chronically short of breath, bloated by retained fluid and fearful of what could happen next. Transplants – 200 a year in the UK – are funded by the NHS, but less so this “bridge to life” approach. As a result, Westaby argues, 12,000 people a year die unnecessarily. He is angry about “the rise and fall of the NHS”.
In his powerful book, Fragile Lives: A Heart Surgeon’s Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table, Westaby tells how “the back-street boy” from a Scunthorpe council estate decided to become a heart surgeon at the age of seven, prompted by watching American surgeons performing a hole-in-the-heart operation on television. His grandad, a steelworker, was felled at 63 by heart disease. His grandmother died of thyroid cancer soon after. The awful manner of their deaths has been a lifelong spur.
Westaby has always taken the apparently hopeless adult cases and the complex congenital anomalies in the very young, with hearts swollen by disease from the proportions of a walnut to a lemon. Failure brings “shit and derision”. He has a buccaneer style, an Errol Flynn in scrubs. “The grim reaper was visiting this battle,” he writes. “And about to swing his scythe.”
The heart is wondrous in its design. It beats more than 60 times per minute, 31m times a year, “contraction and relaxation… narrowing, twisting and shortening… a veritable Argentine tango”.
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As a rugby-playing, testosterone-fuelled medical student, aged 18, he illicitly watched from the eaves of the Ether Dome, in the then Charing Cross hospital, as a 26-year-old woman called Beth was operated on for a heart weakened by rheumatic fever. She died. A year later, Christiaan Barnard performed the first human-to-human heart transplant. The patient lived for 18 days.
“Beth wanted me to be a cardiac surgeon,” Westaby writes, complex surgery out of his reach today because of a distorted hand caused by Dupuytren’s contracture. “And I didn’t disappoint her. I was good at it.”
Westaby’s mantra is: “Move on, learn, try harder.” Innovation, he argues, is the goal, not outcomes. Since 2013, performance has been measured in “surgeon-specific mortality data”. As a result, he believes that cardiac surgery is too risky today for young students. They are “downtrodden, defensive, uncertain of themselves”.
In the 60s, a heart attack meant seven out of 10 patients died. Now, seven out of 10 survive, but one person with cardiovascular disease dies every three minutes. Questions arise as Westaby chronicles his life. Is he motivated by an opportunity to write an academic paper? Attract publicity? Push research and treatment a little further? Save a patient when the alternative is death? And, for the reader, which takes priority and what weight does quality of life have against the drive to intervene medically, often repeatedly and brutally, because professionals can?
We, the public, want the medical profession to break the rules. Except when we don't. Therein lies an ethical dilemma
Similar questions arise in Emergency Admissions: Memoirs of an Ambulance Driver by Kit Wharton, which documents the people he has helped and ferried since joining the ambulance service in 2003. Wharton’s father was treated in the John Radcliffe hospital, Oxford, Westaby’s domain, after a massive stroke in 1995 and kept alive in a vegetative state for 18 months. “Would it have been better to let him go?” Wharton asks. “What do I know?” But we do know. We, the public, want the medical profession to break the rules, except when we don’t – and therein lies a huge ethical dilemma.
Wharton describes with black humour how he was reared in a dysfunctional family – “EastEnders with posh people”. His father, “a serious journalist”, lived apart with his wife and children, visiting Wharton’s mother and the two children she’d had with him – his “second-class family” – for frequently drunken battles. Wharton (a former journalist himself) is passionate about his job. He delivers to hospital the “frequent flyers… that have scratched their fingers opening their dole cheque. And those broken by life.”
Westaby and the NHS were born in the same month in the same year, July 1948, when demand was for acute care. People on average did not have long lives. Now an ageing population, medical breakthroughs, not least the kind in which Westaby has specialised all his professional life, and conditions that are the product, paradoxically, of affluence and deprivation – obesity, cancer, asthma – mean millions live many years with costly chronic disease.
Life on the brink: paramedics spring into action outside A&E.
Now who gets what, when and on what criteria prompts Westaby’s profound frustration at “the Stasi”. Providing an artificial heart costs hundreds of thousands of pounds. The longest a recipient has lived, Peter Houghton, operated on by Westaby in 2000, is seven years. Houghton carried the batteries for his heart in a shoulder bag and had a plug in his head. When questioned about his extra lease of life, Houghton replied: “Three days out of five, it’s better than being dead.”
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Fragile Lives is not for the faint-hearted; breast bones are sawn apart, body fluids gush, but empathy isn’t absent. In 1998, Julie, a 20-year-old student, is healthy one week and has a heart dangerously weakened by a viral infection the next. Westaby operates – “[I] ran the saw up the sternum” – and inserts a new American pump, an AB-180. He has no permission from the hospital ethics committee and no idea how the bills will be paid. “I was not the kind of doctor who’d let a young patient die because of some bureaucratic detail.”
Julie is alive today, as is Kirsty, operated on as a six-month-old baby, with Westaby innovating as he cuts, and learning in both cases that, given a chance, the heart can heal itself: a groundbreaking discovery.
Westaby spent years in a draughty portable building at the John Radcliffe hospital fighting for funds. Now he is in the private sector, based at Swansea University, continuing to develop heart technology and the use of stem cells. Wharton works on in an NHS that is weak at the knees, reeling from serial reorganisations, underfunding, managerial overload and privatisation, applying sticking plasters to diseases spawned by inequality.
Chroniclers such as Westaby and Wharton are much needed to remind us of the ethical dilemmas that have yet to be resolved, the value of vocation and why, for all its flaws, the NHS is a public service that must not be allowed to die.
• Fragile Lives: A Heart Surgeon’s Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table by Stephen Westaby is published by Harper Collins (£12.99). Emergency Admissions by Kit Wharton is published by 4th Estate (£9.99). To order copies for £11.04 and £7.49 respectively, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
Fragile Lives : A Heart Surgeon’s Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table by Stephen Westaby - review
At the cutting-edge of scalpel-lit. By Rosamund Urwin
ROSAMUND URWIN
Thursday 2 February 2017 19:15
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You can imagine the conversation in the HarperCollins office. “That book by the neurosurgeon did well, didn’t it?” some sage of publishing will have said, scouring Nielsen and finding that Henry Marsh’s Do No Harm sold 140,000 copies. “So did the ones by the endocrine surgeon [Atul Gawande]. Brains. Thyroids. Surely hearts are next?” So here it is: tales from the operating table of cardiothoracic surgeon Stephen Westaby, the latest foray into scalpel-lit.
I shouldn’t be too snarky. It certainly beats handing book deals to YouTube’s spotty drivel-spouters or posh university dropouts peddling faddy diets. And as someone with a niggling fear that I should have picked the stethoscope over the pen as a career, I love getting a window into this world.
And what a window. Westaby, who worked at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, was a “heart surgeon for 35 years without being sued or suspended, an increasingly rare species”. That’s him being modest. He is a pioneer, famed for being the first surgeon to fit a patient with a new type of artificial heart and leading the way with surgery for complex congenital anomalies in babies and toddlers.
Westaby didn’t come from a medical family. He grew up in Scunthorpe, “church-mice poor in a grimy council estate”. Aged 16, having been sacked from the steelworks, he got a job as a hospital porter in the school holidays. Eventually he persuaded a pathologist to let him watch autopsies. Fascinated, and having watched his grandfather die of heart failure, he found his career.
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It is not a glamorous calling. As a trainee Westaby stood in his own urine so he could stay on his feet during a long operation, a feat achieved using rubber tubing and big surgical boots. Sleep deprivation was an inevitable hazard. And there’s as much gore as the crusades: “Blood dripped from the lights and red rivulets streamed across the marble floor.”
In Fragile Lives he recounts some of his most taxing operations and memorable patients. He tends to an 18-month-old boy in Saudi Arabia who has an engorged heart on the wrong side of his chest. The boy and his mother had been found by the Red Cross on the border between Oman and Yemen; she — having been raped and mutilated — could not speak.
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In Cape Town, his patient is Oslin, a boy who has survived an explosion from the family’s faulty gas cylinder but inhaled hot gas. Oslin recovers from a complex operation only to drop dead 18 months later. As Westaby notes: “Sometimes life is shit.” Surgeons have to be detached, perhaps even cold, to keep picking up the scalpel: “You can’t look back.”
Westaby found all this addictive. “Cardiac surgery is like quicksand. Once in it you’re sucked deeper and deeper, and I struggled to leave the hospital in case something remarkable happened and I missed it.”
His devotion to his craft demanded sacrifice: in the acknowledgments he mentions the “distress caused to his first wife Jane” and the neglect of his offspring: “While I spent many hours trying to save other people’s children, I never spent enough time with my own.” And he retired last year after developing Dupuytren’s contracture, a claw hand, his fingers contorted into the position in which he held the scissors and sternal saw.
I enjoyed so much in this book — the anatomy lesson, the vivid descriptions, the fervour Westaby feels for his work. All proof that there’s room on the shelf for more scalpel-lit.