Walk on Water (Ruhlman)

Think of a doctor. No, a surgeon. Make that a heart surgeon. Better yet, a heart surgeon who specializes exclusively in fixing congenital heart defects in newborns. Now, imagine what that person would be like, and I bet it’s nothing like Roger Mee, the world-renowned surgeon profiled in this book. Michael Ruhlman convinced Dr Mee, and his surgical team at the Cleveland Clinic, to give him an all-access pass; after, of course, some initial reluctance. The result is a sensitive and nuanced profile of how one small corner of a complex and difficult medical specialty works. Mee and his team do several operations a day, almost every day. Remarkably, the vast majority of their patients live– Mee’s surgical mortality hovers in the 2% range, and the story of how Mee works his magic (one grandmother says, without any apparent irony, “They say Dr Mee has the hands of God” while Mee describes himself as “a regular bloke”).
Ruhlman writes with a great deal of sensitivity and skill (as you’d expect, given that all of his books focus on craftsmen of various stripes). I was impressed with his ability to convey the pathos of the Cleveland pediatric ICU without being saccharine or phony. In fact, I was in tears several times while reading accounts of the trials faced by various patients (and there are lots more of them at the Congenital Heart Information Network). Reading this has certainly helped renew my appreciation and thankfulness for my three wonderful, healthy sons, and it taught me a great deal about a fascinating medical subspeciality of which I was heretofore ignorant. I’ll be looking for Ruhlman’s other books. This will be on my year-end top-10 list.