Myles Edwin Lee The Donation
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by Myles Edwin Lee, M.D.

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The one gift you don't want to return.

Judge Joseph Spencer needs a heart transplant. It's taken a lot of fast talking from his wife and doctor to convince him, but he's finally capitulated. While in preoperative holding and just minutes before his surgery, Spencer recognizes the donor of his new heart. Spencer's sedation makes it impossible for him to protest what for him is an unimaginable horror, and he loses consciousness, unable to abort the procedure, even though to do so could cost him his life. Spencer survives the surgery but becomes suicidal.

Spencer's doctor, chief heart-transplant surgeon Ross Fairing, discovers that he and his team have been unwitting co-conspirators in the death of the donor who had no business on an operating table, let alone be in a hospital. He confronts his own consternation that a courageous and innovative operation had created an ethical conundrum that could destroy his transplant program and his career, cause the hospital to lose its accreditation, and result in the death of the patient. 

What is the source of Spencer's conflict? Why did he detest the heart that was keeping him alive. Who is the mysterious donor, found comatose and near death in the hospital parking lot? Where did he come from? How did he get there? And how does a shocking revelation at the end of the book, a revelation that turns a tragedy driven by one man's grief into an affirmation of life, release Spencer from his suicidal torments and return him to the world of the living?

Morality and medicine collide with the criminal justice system in The Donation, a medical thriller which concludes with the shocking proposal that organ donation be offered to prisoners on death row as a means of execution. In doing so, lethal injection becomes as much a vehicle for redemption as it is a means of punishment. The Donation explores this and other controversial issues in the medicine and in the world of capital punishment.






Near Misses in Cardiac Surgery, best-seller in its field when originally published, has been reissued with a new foreword by Denton A. Cooley, M.D., Surgeon-in-Chief, Texas Heart Institute. Now endorsed by contemporary leaders in cardiac surgery, extracorporeal perfusion, and cardiology, Near Misses in Cardiac Surgery has stood the test of time and will introduce a new generation of surgeons and interventionalists to principles, timeless as they are essential, that enable the outcomes of cardiothoracic procedures, once performed only by surgeons in the operating room, to be successful in new hybrid suitesduring a transitional period in our history.                                                                           

Historian Daniel Boorstin has said, "Trying to plan for the future without a sense of the past is like trying to plant cut flowers." No matter what the technical advances are, the same principles that facilitate successful outcomes in surgery (teamwork,communication, vigilance, standardization and simplicity of techniques, anticipation of the next step) apply as well to today's hybrid procedures. Reading like a medical thriller, Near Misses in Cardiac Surgery presents synopses of 43 true cases in which the patients survived, in the expectation that the reader, cast as the surgeon, will determine the cause of the problem and solve it before the patient's demise. The next section identifies the problem and how it was actually resolved by the surgical team. Each case concludes with a detailed discussion and references.

 Near Misses in Cardiac Surgery has become a resource for the Cardiothoracic Surgery Network's safety reporting system ( and was used as the template by CTSNet as a teaching tool for the anonymous reporting of disasters by cardiac surgeons from around the world.

Written to challenge the reader that the patient's fate depends upon his or her ability to make appropriate decisions quickly and under pressure, this book will continue to provide clinical insight, not only for experienced cardiac surgeons, fellows and residents, but for anesthesiologists, cardiologists, internists, medical students, and nurses, as well.