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Summary
Summary
Every time surgeons operate, they're betting their skills are better than the brain tumor, the faulty heart valve, the fractured femur. Sometimes, they're wrong. At Chelsea General, surgeons answer for bad outcomes at the Morbidity and Mortality conference, known as M & M. This extraordinary peek behind the curtain into what is considered the most secretive meeting in all of medicine is the back drop for the entire book.
Monday Mornings , by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, follows the lives of five surgeons at Chelsea General as they push the limits of their abilities and confront their personal and professional failings, often in front of their peers at M & M. It is on Monday mornings that reflection and introspection occurs, usually in private. It is Monday Mornings that provides a unique look at the real method in which surgeons learn - through their mistakes. It is Monday Mornings when, if you're lucky, you have a chance at redemption.
Author Notes
Sanjay Gupta, MD, is a practicing neurosurgeon at Emory University Hospital and associate chief of service at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In his fiction debut, Dr. Gupta-a practicing neurosurgeon and Chief Medical Correspondent at CNN-transports readers into an exclusive cadre of Chelsea General surgeons linked by the dreaded and revered Morbidity and Mortality (M&M) conferences on the titular Monday mornings-the meetings at which doctors are held accountable for mistakes or deaths in the operating room. Each of the lavishly described (though emotionally flat) main characters is a caricature of a surgeon: for the overly-dedicated Sydney Saxena, life is career, pager, exercise. Tina Ridgeway-the gorgeous, married brainiac-and heartthrob Ty Wilson, the first to endure an M&M, satisfy the requisite hospital drama illicit romance; meticulous Sung Park wants to see Ty "publicly crucified;" and XXXL-scrubbed George "Gato Grande" Villanueva is the brilliant, brash, ER chief and former NFL player around which much of the novel revolves. Despite these potentially intriguing character sketches and plot points, Gupta (Cheating Death) attempts to weave too many threads and is thus unable to sufficiently develop his doctors or a compelling story line. Though the book reads quickly, medical jargon will alternately intrigue and frustrate a general audience, and readers will be left wondering whether Gupta should be the subject of his own M&M. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Standard-issue medical procedural from CNN medical correspondent and surgeon Gupta (Cheating Death, 2009). In this debut novel, Gupta commits some of the more common errors of Fiction 101 by telling more than showing, and then showing the mundane with as much attention as the distinctive. Thus the second sentence of the book: "Wearing bright blue polyester jumpsuits with a yellow insignia on the left front pocket and standard-issue black boots, they were moving fast." Moving fast, check. But would it have mattered whether the uniforms were of green cotton, the badges red, the boots brown? The matter-of-factness and attention to every detail would probably serve a surgeon in theater very well, the purposes of a yarn less effectively; yet both qualities overwhelm the dramatic: "The aneurysm, a small blister on the surface of an artery, had suddenly let loose, spraying blood throughout her brain. She had likely felt a sudden thunderclap headache, and within seconds was rendered unconscious." "One of the possible risks was damage to the olfactory nerve that ran near the cancerous growth. If that was nicked or cut, the patient would lose the sense of smell." Just so, Gupta's characters are of the stock variety: the hardbitten, arrogant master cutter, the encouraging mentor, the poor kid out to save the world ("the first Robidaux to consider college," the foreign resident who works twice as hard as everyone else--in short, the kind of people whom, mutatis mutandis, you'd send into combat in a World War II film, or, in this instance, into the emergency ward. In that regard, Gupta's book makes its greatest contribution: It shows that a doctor's life isn't all glamour and golf on one hand or completely clinical on the other, even if most of the coitus is interruptus. All does not end well, not for certain patients and certain docs alike, but the quotidian world ticks on; it's very much as if James Michener had attempted a medical thriller, though without the thrill and without Michener's epic length. Competent but no more--and, of course, one always wants something beyond mere competence from a surgeon.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In the high-stakes profession of neurosurgery, the bigger you are, the harder you fall. Or so it seems in the nifty first novel by CNN's chief medical correspondent Gupta, who is also a practicing neurosurgeon and nonfiction author. At the Chelsea General Hospital in Michigan, Dr. Ty Wilson is suffering from a serious crisis in confidence after a child dies during an operation. His medical colleagues include George Villanueva, a hulking former NFL player turned ER doctor, and Tina Ridgeway, a meticulous neurosurgeon whose home life is a mess. For quirkiness, there's a patient who undergoes surgery for bleeding cerebral aneurysms and develops an unusual postoperative mania for sketching human ears. For irony, the perfectionist head of surgery makes a jumbo mistake, and a middle-aged Korean neurosurgeon is afflicted with a deadly brain tumor. Despite their flaws, these fictional physicians possess extremely high empathy quotients. They make clinical and personal blunders, yet some attain redemption, and nearly all experience epiphanies. You don't have to be a brain surgeon to write a novel, but with Monday Mornings, readers will be glad one did.--Miksanek, Tony Copyright 2010 Booklist
Library Journal Review
A CNN medical reporter, TV host, and practicing neuro-surgeon, Gupta has written a first novel that "anyone who enjoys medical fiction should like." (LJ 2/15/12) (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.