Dr. Andrew Kadar

I wrote Getting Better to help people facing a medical crisis (and their loved ones) navigate the road to recovery. I learned a lot from my time as an open-heart surgery patient, and would like others to benefit from my experience.

I graduated from Yale Medical School, completed my residency at Stanford and Harvard Universities (Massachusetts General Hospital), and was working as an anesthesiologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where I routinely took care of cardiac patients.

I got the shock of my life when I suddenly went from doctor to patient. I had always been in great health and had expected that to continue for a long time. I was familiar with illness denial and the symptoms of coronary artery disease. Despite that, I went into denial when I first experienced symptoms. After my diagnosis, I expected to recover in record time from my surgery. That didn’t turn out so well either, since I experienced several complications. My eventual recovery is an encouraging story.