Medical Books
Medicine
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All That Moves Us: A Pediatric Neurosurgeon, His Young Patients, and Their Stories of Grace and Resilience
"The surgical interventions in these pages are dizzying, but the fact that Jay Wellons can write as well as he can operate provides a whole other level of amazement."-Ann Patchett, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Commonwealth
"A powerful and moving account of the intense joys and sorrows of being a pediatric neurosurgeon."-Henry Marsh, New York Times bestselling author of Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery
Tumors, injuries, ruptured vascular malformations-there is almost no such thing as a non-urgent brain surgery when it comes to kids. For a pediatric neurosurgeon working in the medical minefield of the brain-in which a single millimeter in every direction governs something that makes us essentially human-every day presents the challenge, and the opportunity, to give a new lease on life to a child for whom nothing is yet fully determined and all possibilities still exist.
In All That Moves Us, Dr. Jay Wellons pulls back the curtain to reveal the profoundly moving triumphs, haunting complications, and harrowing close calls that characterize the life of a pediatric neurosurgeon, bringing the high-stakes drama of the operating room to life with astonishing candor and honest compassion. Reflecting on lessons learned over twenty-five years and thousands of operations completed on some of the most vulnerable and precious among us, Wellons recounts in gripping detail the moments that have shaped him as a doctor, as a parent, and as the only hope for countless patients whose young lives are in his hands.
Wellons shares scenes of his early days as the son of a military pilot, the years of grueling surgical training, and true stories of what it's like to treat the brave children he meets on the threshold between life and death. From the little boy who arrived at the hospital near death from a gunshot wound to the head, to the eight-year-old whose shredded nerves were repaired using suture as fine as human hair, to the brave mother-to-be undergoing fetal spinal cord surgery, All That Moves Us is an unforgettable portrait of the countless human dramas that take place in a busy modern children's hospital-and a meditation on the marvel of life as seen from under the white-hot lights of the operating room.
"A powerful and moving account of the intense joys and sorrows of being a pediatric neurosurgeon."-Henry Marsh, New York Times bestselling author of Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery
Tumors, injuries, ruptured vascular malformations-there is almost no such thing as a non-urgent brain surgery when it comes to kids. For a pediatric neurosurgeon working in the medical minefield of the brain-in which a single millimeter in every direction governs something that makes us essentially human-every day presents the challenge, and the opportunity, to give a new lease on life to a child for whom nothing is yet fully determined and all possibilities still exist.
In All That Moves Us, Dr. Jay Wellons pulls back the curtain to reveal the profoundly moving triumphs, haunting complications, and harrowing close calls that characterize the life of a pediatric neurosurgeon, bringing the high-stakes drama of the operating room to life with astonishing candor and honest compassion. Reflecting on lessons learned over twenty-five years and thousands of operations completed on some of the most vulnerable and precious among us, Wellons recounts in gripping detail the moments that have shaped him as a doctor, as a parent, and as the only hope for countless patients whose young lives are in his hands.
Wellons shares scenes of his early days as the son of a military pilot, the years of grueling surgical training, and true stories of what it's like to treat the brave children he meets on the threshold between life and death. From the little boy who arrived at the hospital near death from a gunshot wound to the head, to the eight-year-old whose shredded nerves were repaired using suture as fine as human hair, to the brave mother-to-be undergoing fetal spinal cord surgery, All That Moves Us is an unforgettable portrait of the countless human dramas that take place in a busy modern children's hospital-and a meditation on the marvel of life as seen from under the white-hot lights of the operating room.
Editorial Reviews
"All That Moves Us tells the story of lives that have been shattered and reassembled. The surgical interventions in these pages are dizzying, but the fact that Jay Wellons can write as well as he can operate provides a whole other level of amazement. This is a wondrous and deeply moving book."-Ann Patchett, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Commonwealth
"As a surgeon, Jay Wellons has long healed with his hands. What this engaging and illuminating book shows us is how important the heart is in the life and work of a doctor charged with the sacred-even staggering-task of operating on the brains of children. At once reflective and searching, Wellons's stories from the journey give us hope that light can emerge from even the darkest of hours."-Jon Meacham, #1 New York Times bestselling author of His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope
"Reading All That Moves Us feels like watching a full season of your favorite medical drama, complete with harrowing surgical scenes and meaningful reflections within each episode. In bearing witness to some of life's most profound moments, Jay Wellons has written an extraordinarily memorable book."-Mary Laura Philpott, author of Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives
"Breathtaking . . . Medical memoirs don't come much better than this."-Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A compelling look into the life of a pediatric neurosurgeon . . . adramatic narrative inside and outside the operating room." -Kirkus Reviews
"As a surgeon, Jay Wellons has long healed with his hands. What this engaging and illuminating book shows us is how important the heart is in the life and work of a doctor charged with the sacred-even staggering-task of operating on the brains of children. At once reflective and searching, Wellons's stories from the journey give us hope that light can emerge from even the darkest of hours."-Jon Meacham, #1 New York Times bestselling author of His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope
"Reading All That Moves Us feels like watching a full season of your favorite medical drama, complete with harrowing surgical scenes and meaningful reflections within each episode. In bearing witness to some of life's most profound moments, Jay Wellons has written an extraordinarily memorable book."-Mary Laura Philpott, author of Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives
"Breathtaking . . . Medical memoirs don't come much better than this."-Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A compelling look into the life of a pediatric neurosurgeon . . . adramatic narrative inside and outside the operating room." -Kirkus Reviews
Short Excerpt Teaser
1
The Reminder
Throughout the spring of 2020, our hospital, like many others, was consumed with preparation for the pandemic. As colleagues on the West Coast affected by the earliest North American wave recounted their initial experiences via group call, social media, or text thread, the overall sense became bleak. Instead of performing surgery, I was tasked with sifting through rapidly incoming data (some valid, some not) as part of a perioperative committee that stood up to prepare for the anticipated surge of patients. Service teams were quickly boiled down to the most essential; operative procedures were canceled unless deemed urgent; all non-clinical personnel were sent home.
Into this, a twelve-year-old presented comatose with a ruptured brain arteriovenous malformation (AVM). A few hours earlier, she and her family had been following the state and local stay-at-home order by gathering to watch a Harry Potter movie marathon when she began to complain of a severe headache. Within minutes she was unresponsive.
This is the most challenging aspect of pediatric neurosurgery, the constant sense of impending calamity that spills over into your life outside work. Over the years, you become so conditioned to emergencies that the random becomes the reliable.
One minute it's popcorn and Harry Potter with the family, and then suddenly your daughter has the worst headache of her life and seizes from a brain hemorrhage.
Or a child eating breakfast before school slumps down into their cereal, the parents believing it's a gag until the terrible realization dawns that it's not.
Brakes on a bike that fail and into traffic your thirteen-year-old goes.
A father who turns his head while driving just to make sure his two-year-old's car-seat harness is on correctly, then runs off the road into a tree. Two days later he and his wife, still in neck braces and wheelchairs from the accident, have to make the decision to take their child, never to recover, off the ventilator.
These all roar at me in what must be normal moments for everyone else. A car seat was not just an inconvenient safety chore. It became as important to me as the moment the technicians would secure the Apollo astronauts into their safety harnesses before launch. Seeing my son jump helmetless onto a friend's skateboard spontaneously triggers memories of open depressed skull fractures rushed into the OR at 2:00 in the morning, someone's child's blood saturating my scrub pants all the way through until the material is pasted on my skin. Every moment in the car, every meal together, every time my children leave the house, if I let myself slide, I see the Jaws of Life, or a seizure, or a policeman knocking on my door.
At an emergency room near the twelve-year-old girl's home, a breathing tube had been inserted and mechanical ventilation was started, a lifesaving intervention to buy time. A CT scan had revealed a large blood clot inside the left frontal lobe of her brain pushing over to the right, and the hint of a small offending tangle of blood vessels, the AVM, just under the normally unperturbed surface. A doctor at the outside emergency room two and a half hours away had correctly made the diagnosis of a ruptured AVM and drilled a small hole through the skull to place a drain in the cerebral ventricles. This does two main things. It helps to reduce the pressure that can build up quickly inside the skull in situations like a brain hemorrhage, trauma, or a brain tumor, by physically draining the built-up CSF-cerebrospinal fluid-inside the brain. That drain also acts as a pressure monitor when connected to a bedside display. Having that number, the intracranial pressure, to follow then enables the nurses and doctors to infuse special intravenous medication that helps to lower that pressure and buy a little extra time for definitive care.
AVMs are among the most difficult operations we do. In normal circumstances, arteries are thick-walled and carry oxygenated blood under high pressure from the heart to the brain (and the rest of the body for that matter). That blood pressure then dissipates as the arteries continue to divide into smaller and more numerous arterioles and then finally until they turn into tiny capillaries. The capillary bed in most organs is made up of thousands of tiny vessels, each one the width of an individual red blood cell, and the oxygen within that cell is delivered through the capillary wall to the organ in need. That loss of oxygen is what causes the blood to lose its bright red color and turn darker, bluish. The deoxygenated bluish blood is under lower pressure on the other side of the capillary bed and begins to drain into larger and larger thin-walled veins that chann...
The Reminder
Throughout the spring of 2020, our hospital, like many others, was consumed with preparation for the pandemic. As colleagues on the West Coast affected by the earliest North American wave recounted their initial experiences via group call, social media, or text thread, the overall sense became bleak. Instead of performing surgery, I was tasked with sifting through rapidly incoming data (some valid, some not) as part of a perioperative committee that stood up to prepare for the anticipated surge of patients. Service teams were quickly boiled down to the most essential; operative procedures were canceled unless deemed urgent; all non-clinical personnel were sent home.
Into this, a twelve-year-old presented comatose with a ruptured brain arteriovenous malformation (AVM). A few hours earlier, she and her family had been following the state and local stay-at-home order by gathering to watch a Harry Potter movie marathon when she began to complain of a severe headache. Within minutes she was unresponsive.
This is the most challenging aspect of pediatric neurosurgery, the constant sense of impending calamity that spills over into your life outside work. Over the years, you become so conditioned to emergencies that the random becomes the reliable.
One minute it's popcorn and Harry Potter with the family, and then suddenly your daughter has the worst headache of her life and seizes from a brain hemorrhage.
Or a child eating breakfast before school slumps down into their cereal, the parents believing it's a gag until the terrible realization dawns that it's not.
Brakes on a bike that fail and into traffic your thirteen-year-old goes.
A father who turns his head while driving just to make sure his two-year-old's car-seat harness is on correctly, then runs off the road into a tree. Two days later he and his wife, still in neck braces and wheelchairs from the accident, have to make the decision to take their child, never to recover, off the ventilator.
These all roar at me in what must be normal moments for everyone else. A car seat was not just an inconvenient safety chore. It became as important to me as the moment the technicians would secure the Apollo astronauts into their safety harnesses before launch. Seeing my son jump helmetless onto a friend's skateboard spontaneously triggers memories of open depressed skull fractures rushed into the OR at 2:00 in the morning, someone's child's blood saturating my scrub pants all the way through until the material is pasted on my skin. Every moment in the car, every meal together, every time my children leave the house, if I let myself slide, I see the Jaws of Life, or a seizure, or a policeman knocking on my door.
At an emergency room near the twelve-year-old girl's home, a breathing tube had been inserted and mechanical ventilation was started, a lifesaving intervention to buy time. A CT scan had revealed a large blood clot inside the left frontal lobe of her brain pushing over to the right, and the hint of a small offending tangle of blood vessels, the AVM, just under the normally unperturbed surface. A doctor at the outside emergency room two and a half hours away had correctly made the diagnosis of a ruptured AVM and drilled a small hole through the skull to place a drain in the cerebral ventricles. This does two main things. It helps to reduce the pressure that can build up quickly inside the skull in situations like a brain hemorrhage, trauma, or a brain tumor, by physically draining the built-up CSF-cerebrospinal fluid-inside the brain. That drain also acts as a pressure monitor when connected to a bedside display. Having that number, the intracranial pressure, to follow then enables the nurses and doctors to infuse special intravenous medication that helps to lower that pressure and buy a little extra time for definitive care.
AVMs are among the most difficult operations we do. In normal circumstances, arteries are thick-walled and carry oxygenated blood under high pressure from the heart to the brain (and the rest of the body for that matter). That blood pressure then dissipates as the arteries continue to divide into smaller and more numerous arterioles and then finally until they turn into tiny capillaries. The capillary bed in most organs is made up of thousands of tiny vessels, each one the width of an individual red blood cell, and the oxygen within that cell is delivered through the capillary wall to the organ in need. That loss of oxygen is what causes the blood to lose its bright red color and turn darker, bluish. The deoxygenated bluish blood is under lower pressure on the other side of the capillary bed and begins to drain into larger and larger thin-walled veins that chann...
