Cañon City Public Library

Creative, practical suggestions for family and friends of patients and caregivers. Funded with LSCA-funded Hospice Project money

Writer Kurson tells the true story of one man's heroic odyssey from blindness into sight. Blinded at age three, Mike May defied expectations by breaking world records in downhill speed skiing, joining the CIA, and becoming a successful inventor, entrepreneur, and family man. He had never yearned for vision. Then, in 1999, a chance encounter: a revolutionary stem cell transplant surgery could restore May's vision. He began to contemplate an astonishing...

"In 1944 a groundbreaking operation repaired the congenital heart defect known as blue baby syndrome. The operation's success brought the surgeon Alfred Blalock international fame and paved the way for open-heart surgery. But the technique had been painstakingly developed by Vivien Thomas, Blalocks African American lab assistant, who stood behind Blalock in the operating room to give him step-by-step instructions. The stories of this medical and...

"Having a gender identity that conflicts with one's physical gender is a huge emotional burden. The anxiety, stress and depression that can result from having such a conflict can push a person to the point where everything in life that is held dear is risked to undertake one of the hardest challenges a human being can make: transitioning from one gender to the other. If you have an incongruent gender identity and are considering a gender transition...

Self-proclaimed stuntman Rod Kimble is preparing for the jump of his life. Rod plans to clear fifteen buses in an attempt to raise money for his abusive stepfather Frank's life-saving heart operation. He'll land the jump, get Frank better, and then fight him, hard.

A postman dies on the operating table at a rural English hospital, in the midst of the Nazi blitz. But was his death accidental?

Meditations with guided imagery and suggestions to prepare the mind for medical intervention and healing.

A brilliant young transplant surgeon brings moral intensity and narrative drama to the most powerful and vexing questions of medicine and the human condition. When Chen began medical school, she dreamed of saving lives--what she did not count on was how much death would be a part of her work. Almost immediately, Chen found herself wrestling with medicine's most profound paradox, that a profession premised on caring for the ill also systematically...

"His routine was the same every day for 38 years: up at 4:15, make a turkey-on-rye, drive the deserted Henry Hudson Parkway to the hospital, check the schedule, scrub, cut, reattach, save a life or two, repeat. Until March 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic shut hospital surgeries all over the world. Craig Smith, M.D., Chairman of the Department of Surgery at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, went from performing heart surgeries on patients both everyday...