The First Breath
How Modern Medicine Saves the Most Fragile Lives
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
‘Fascinating and moving.' - Adam Kay, author of This is Going to Hurt
A BBC Radio 4 A Good Read choice
This is a story about the cutting-edge medicine that has saved a generation of babies.
It's about the love and fear a parent feels for a child they haven’t yet met.
It's about doctors, mothers, fathers and babies as together they fight for the first breath.
The First Breath is a book about motherhood and medicine.
Olivia Gordon decided to find out how, exactly, modern science saved her son’s life. Crossing medical memoir with popular science, The First Breath is an investigation into the pioneering fetal and neonatal care bringing a new generation into the world, who would not have lived if they had been born only a few decades ago.
The First Breath explores the female experience of medicine and details the relationship mothers develop with doctors who hold not only life and death in their hands, but also the very possibility of birth.
From the dawn of fetal medicine to neonatal surgery and the exploding field of perinatal genetics, The First Breath tells of fear, bravery and love. Olivia Gordon takes the reader behind the closed doors of the fetal and neonatal intensive care units, resuscitation rooms and operating theatres at some of the world’s leading children’s hospitals, unveiling the untold story of how doctors save the sickest babies.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Gordon debuts with an affecting and highly personal exploration of the medical advances that have saved babies who "would not have survived... if born 30, 20, or even 10 years ago." In 2011, Gordon was 29 weeks pregnant when she learned her son had a rare problem, hydrops fetalis, affecting his ability to process amniotic fluid. As Gordon learns more about the condition, she reaches out to other parents who had had severe birth complications. She interviews neonatal physicians, synopsizes their field's history, and warning for squeamish readers gives a graphic, firsthand description of a fetal surgery procedure that only became possible in 1997 ("the mother's abdomen was opened and the uterus popped up like popcorn, pink and round"). As many stories are encouraging (such as about high success rates for treating spina bifida prenatally) as are heartbreaking (as when only one of a pair of premature twins survives). After her son's (natural) birth and six-month hospital stay, Gordon arrives at a measured happy ending, with her son now eight, healthy, and still bearing a fetally implanted shunt in his chest while dealing with a genetic disorder Noonan syndrome apparently linked to his difficult gestation. Gordon's audience will find this a tough but rewarding report from the front lines of fetal and neonatal medicine.
