patients

Once Anna Lyndsey had an ordinary life. She was young and ambitious and worked hard. She had just bought an apartment and she was falling in love. Then, what began as a mild intolerance to certain types of artificial light, developed into a sensitivity of all light. During the worst times, Anna must spend months in a blacked-out room where she loses herself in audio books and elaborate word games in an attempt to stave off despair. In periods of relative remission, she can venture out cautiously at dawn or dusk. Eventually, Anna's unthinkable fate becomes a love story from which we can see light and the world anew.

Judith and Joyce Scott were fraternal twins. From birth they lived as though they were one person in two bodies, understanding instinctively what the other wanted and felt, despite the fact that Judy had Down Syndrome, profound deafness, and never learned to speak or sign. But this connection ended abruptly when, at age seven, Judy was taken from their shared bed to be institutionalized while Joyce slept. For the next thirty years, Joyce grieved her unexpected loss while navigating her relationship with an emotionally distant mother. In college, Joyce became pregnant and she, too, was sent away to give birth and relinquish to adoption the secret daughter she bore in hiding. Decades later Joyce resolves to reunite with her sister and hopefully fill their remaining years with joy. After becoming Judy's legal guardian, she enrolls her in an art center for adults with disabilities. Eventually Judy connects with fiber art and works relentlessly for the next eighteen years producing fiber sculptures. Unaware of her growing fame, she remains immersed in her artistic vision until her death in 2005. Today Judith Scott's contemporary fiber art work is displayed in museums and galleries around the world.

Clay Marzo is a professional surfer, regarded as one of the best in the world. He has won numerous surfing competitions and was the subject of the award-winning documentary, Just Add Water. He has also been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome.

Life has just become very complicated for seventeen-year-old Katie; her father walked out a year ago, her mother is stressed out, her brother is a "special needs" teenager, and she is caring for the maternal grandmother she has never met, who is suffering from Alzheimer's--and Katie has a secret of her own that she cannot reveal.

At the age of twenty-five, Josh Sundquist, who had Ewing's sarcoma as a child and is now a paralympic ski racer, looks back to try to understand why he has never had a steady girlfriend.

Elena Dunkle, cowriting with her mother, recounts her struggles with anorexia as a teen and twenty-something - from denial, to treatment centers, to recovery.

"At the age of 36, on the verge of a completing a decade's worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi's health began to falter. He started losing weight and was wracked by waves of excruciating back pain. A CT scan confirmed what Paul, deep down, had suspected: he had stage four lung cancer, widely disseminated. One day, he was a doctor making a living treating the dying, and the next, he was a patient struggling to live. Just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined, the culmination of decades of striving, evaporated. With incredible literary quality, philosophical acuity, and medical authority, When Breath Becomes Air approaches the questions raised by facing mortality from the dual perspective of the neurosurgeon who spent a decade meeting patients in the twilight between life and death, and the terminally ill patient who suddenly found himself living in that liminality. At the base of Paul's inquiry are essential questions, such as: What makes life worth living in the face of death? What happens when the future, instead of being a ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present? When faced with a terminal diagnosis, what does it mean to have a child, to nuture a new life as another one fades away? As Paul wrote, "Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn't know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn't know when. But now I knew it acutely. The problem wasn't really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live." Paul Kalanithi passed away in March 2015, while working on this book"--.

Enduring regimented and intrusive treatment at an eating-disorder center, seventeen-year-old Stevie is haunted by guilt for her brother's fatal accident and secretly plans to commit suicide on the anniversary of his death.

The story of twenty-four-year-old Susannah Cahalan and the life-saving discovery of the autoimmune disorder that nearly killed her -- and that could perhaps be the root of "demonic possessions" throughout history.