Warrior Patient: A Memoir About Survival, Hope, Love & Laughter

This book is about a person who uses laughter, love, good doctors and guts to completely recover from cancer, kidney failure, dialysis, deadly infections, partial blindness, shingles, large open wounds, a hernia and a little amputation. It takes almost three years to accomplish, but the patient now plays tennis seven days a week (weather permitting), walks, bikes and works out in the gym. Almost miraculously, he is “back to normal.” He laughs a lot. How did he do it?



*****



The world we live in has the best doctors and the most advanced medical system that our civilization has ever known.

Yet 100,000 patients die and nine million suffer injury every year. If medical mistakes were a disease, it would be the sixth leading cause of deaths in America.

In this extraordinary age of medical miracles, patients continue to sink into the quicksand of “going to the hospital.” Who has not heard about someone who checked into a facility for “normal” surgery ... leading to their death?

A cartoon makes a joke out of it. It shows a doctor in a laboratory, surrounded by white lab rats. “We don’t need better medicine,” he announces to his colleagues, “we need stronger lab rats.”

As you read Warrior Patient you become one of the nine million who suffer injury every year. You take an extraordinary, often amusing journey into the quicksand of modern medicine. In the midst of a long list of life-threatening illnesses, you learn to laugh and you learn how to become a much stronger lab rat, a “Warrior Patient.”

You take advantage of America’s fabulous medical system. You are not taken advantage of by that system.

The story unfolds with humor and anecdotes that capture characters, times and places, from good doctors to bad ones, from childhood to old age, from Africa to Sweden. In the end, you completely recover. You live again. You have a life.

Enjoy the trip.