While the book recounts her illness it is really about how doctors see and relate and connect to their patients. Shatteringly personal, and yet wholly universal, she offers a brave road map for anyone navigating illness while presenting physicians with a new paradigm and rationale for embracing the emotional bond between doctor and patient. This year we are reading Rana Awdish’s In Shock, a book that describes a critical care docs descent from health into acute and then to recovery and then to recurrent acute illness. Awdish finds herself up against the same self-protective partitions she was trained to construct as a medical student and physician, she artfully illuminates the dysfunction of disconnection. Awdish comes to understand the fatal flaws in her profession and in her own past actions as a physician while achieving, through unflinching presence, a crystalline vision of a new and better possibility for us all.Īs Dr. Hauntingly perceptive and beautifully written, In Shock allows the reader to transform alongside Awidsh and watch what she discovers in our carefully-cultivated, yet often misguided, standard of care. At each step of the recovery process, Awdish was faced with something even more unexpected: repeated cavalier behavior from her fellow physicians-indifference following human loss, disregard for anguish and suffering, and an exacting emotional distance. Awdish spent months fighting for her life, enduring consecutive major surgeries and experiencing multiple overlapping organ failures. Rana Awdish never imagined that an emergency trip to the hospital would result in hemorrhaging nearly all of her blood volume and losing her unborn first child.

A riveting first-hand account of a physician who's suddenly a dying patient, In Shock 'searches for a glimmer of hope in life’s darkest moments, and finds it.” - The Washington Postĭr.

Dr rana awdish in shock