ANGINA MONOLOGUES: Stories of Surgery for Broken Hearts

Samer Nashef is a cardiac surgeon at Papworth Hospital in Cambridge and a world leading expert on risk and quality in surgical care. He tells heart-stopping stories of transplants, coronary artery bypasses, aorta repair and cardiac arrest and also delivers humane advice about medical realities rarely observed - the futility of obsessing over diet, the necessity of calculating risks, the role of decision making, and the resilience of doctor and patient alike. He takes a scalpel to the medical profession and asks if patients get the standard of care they have a right to expect from their surgeons. Nashef is co-creator of the Euroscore System, a safety and monitoring tool that predicts the outcomes of heart surgery and he has saved thousands of lives too. In his spare time he compiles cryptic crosswords for the Guardian and the Financial Times under the pseudonym The Naked Surgeon. His Monologues speed from the transporting of a donor's heart at the motorway hard shoulder to cautionary stories of excessive intervention gone awry in US hospitals, to a traumatic trip to bring advanced cardiac surgery to the Palestinian West Bank. Magnificently warm, Nashef has the best imaginable bedside manner. 276pp, paperback.