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An intensive care doctor becomes a dying patient in this gripping memoir of desperate illness and unbearable loss and, from a unique perspective, calls for medical professionals to see patients as human beings, not just a diagnosis.

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At seven months pregnant, intensive care doctor Rana Awdish suffered a catastrophic medical event, haemorrhaging nearly all of her blood volume and losing her unborn first child. She spent months fighting for her life in her own hospital, enduring multiple major surgeries and a series of organ failures.

Every step of the way, Awdish was faced with something even more unexpected and shocking than her battle to survive: her fellow doctors´ inability to see and acknowledge the pain of loss and human suffering, the result of a self-protective barrier hard-wired in medical training.

In Shock is Rana Awdish´s searing account of her extraordinary journey from doctor to patient. From a unique perspective, she sees for the first time the dysfunction of her profession´s disconnection from patients and the flaws in her own past practice as a doctor.

Shatteringly personal yet wholly universal, it is both a brave roadmap for anyone navigating illness and a call to arms for doctors to see each patient not as a diagnosis but as a human being.

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"Outstanding... What marks it out is not the scale or urgency of the trauma, although I read the first chapters at such a pace that I almost had to remind myself to breathe. It is the writing. It sparks and crackles with a dark energy... The writing is not just intense, but intelligent... In Shock stands above other patient memoirs." James McConnachie The Sunday Times 20180114

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Rana Awdish is an intensive care doctor and the director of the Pulmonary Hypertension Programme at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. Dr Awdish´s mandate is to improve the patient experience across the US health system and speak on patient advocacy at healthcare venues across the country. She was awarded the Critical Care Teaching Award in 2016 and, in 2017, the Press Ganey Physician of the Year Award and The Schwartz Center´s National Compassionate Caregiver Award.

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