Heart Matters: A Memoir of a Female Heart Surgeon - Softcover

Magliato, Kathy E., M.D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0767930274 ISBN 13: 9780767930277

Publisher: Harmony Books, 2011

Synopsis

An inspiring, surprising, sometimes shocking, and ultimately deeply informative memoir of the high-stakes, high-pressured life of a female heart surgeon.

Dr. Kathy Magliato is one of the few female heart surgeons practicing in the world today. She is also a member of an even more exclusive group--those surgeons specially trained to perform heart transplants. Heart Matters is the story of the making of a surgeon who is also a wife and mother. In this powerful and moving memoir, Dr. Magliato takes us into her highly demanding, physically intense, male-dominated world and shows us how she masterfully works to save patients' lives every day, while also maintaining balance at home. Heart Matters is also a wake-up call to all women about their number one killer - heart disease - and explains how to avoid becoming a victim.

Magliato offers a vivid behind-the-scenes view of what really goes on in an operating room and the real-life drama that occurs there. She shows the passion and commitment between patient and doctor, revealing that, at the end of a long day, it's our hearts that matter most.

About this title

Review

Starred Review. In her amazing memoir, Magliato belies the myth of surgeons as distant, cocky, robotic--and male. Yet she also bluntly explains why, as one of the world's very few female heart surgeons, she once relied on the psychological "full metal jacket." "Sometimes, it was the only thing holding me together," she says of the distance she needed during an insanely grueling training in cardiac surgery. Magliato describes the bloody trenches of the operating theater; the vulnerable patients who are saved or who die; and the juggling of a demanding career with her role as wife and mother. However, it's the doctor's tender heart that makes her far more than a "healing robot." Recounting one patient's dying moments, Magliato acknowledges that she was unable to help the woman live but is proud that, at the least, "I gave her... a beautiful exit from this world. When it's my time to go, that's how I want to die. In the arms of my son." Look for sobering statistics on women and heart disease, and an inspiring example of living and loving life to the fullest. (Jan.)
--Publishers Weekly

When a female resident seeks entry into that rarefied boys' club of heart surgeons, fasten your seat belt for a bumpy ride. Only her custom self-constructed "full-metal jacket" ("No one could get close to me. . . . I had a force field around me and I liked it that way") worn as the first woman accepted into surgical training at Akron's General Medical Center, held Magliato together. Her impoverished early childhood of working long hours affected her profoundly as she became an undaunted physician "utterly focused as a lead surgeon of a seventeen-hour artificial heart implant case." Impassioned about the heart, she completed her cardiothoracic training in 1998; then followed a year in heart transplantation, finally achieving a "real job" with a paycheck at 36. But for her it's not about money but "the thrill of touching the human heart" while balancing her professional life sans "jacket" and her personal roles as wife and mother, never easily but with hectic good humor, authentic caring, and in this book, fast-paced, smooth writing that never bores.
-- Whitney Scott, Booklist

About the Author

Kathy E. Magliato, MD, is currently the director of women's cardiac services at Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, California. She lives in Pacific Palisades with her husband and their two children.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harmony Books
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0767930274
• ISBN 13: 9780767930277
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 261