As I Live & Breathe
Jamie Weisman
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buy *As I Live and Breathe: Notes of a Patient Doctor* online As I Live and Breathe:Notes of a Patient Doctor
Jamie Weisman
North Point Press
Hardcover
244 pages
June 2002
rated 4 of 5 possible stars

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Jamie Weisman is a doctor with true empathy. Empathy is not just feeling pity for someone, but is the ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes and walk around in them. To know what that person knows in that situation, to understand exactly how they feel. Jamie Weisman suffers from a congenital immune deficiency disorder.

Curled Up With a Good BookIt took eleven years of misdiagnosis, unnecessary surgery, bone marrow biopsies and the insult of being called a hypochondriac. After all of this, being around good and bad doctors, Jamie decided to become one herself. Her unique understanding of what a patient feels gives her the ability to comfort her patients, to help them understand what they are being told and how it will affect them. She can put herself in their shoes and walk around because she’s been there.

Written like a journal, As I Live and Breathe tells the story of Jamie’s medical problems and treatments, her training in medical school, and early life as a doctor, wife and mother. Her situation arouses curiosity before readers have even opened the front cover. How do you get by day-to-day with a lifelong illness? Once you are ill, why do you decide to go into medicine? Still, some might hesitate to read her story. Not everyone is a big fan of superhumans, the people who never feel the negative emotions that drag the rest of down. Some might be afraid that As I Live and Breathe will be so full of the goodness of Jamie Weisman that they'll want to puke. Not so. Weisman gives an honest portrayal of her reactions. She is flawed and imperfect. Jamie gets depressed, angry and frustrated just like the rest of us -- even more so, because she must battle her own body on a daily basis.

Weisman's memoir truly inspires reevaluation of one's life, and the things that many consider to be problems. I know that I began to be very thankful for my health after reading this book. My problems with work, friends and family seemed very small. For this reason alone, As I Live and Breathe is worth reading. After you’re done reading, you’ll find plenty more reasons to read it again.


© 2002 by Kim Lightfoot for Curled Up With a Good Book


buy *As I Live and Breathe: Notes of a Patient Doctor* online
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