Overview

The birthing of a new baby is one of life's great medical and human dramas. When it goes well, it is a loud and joyful mess. But when it goes badly, it is a travesty, devastating not only to hopeful mothers, but also to their doctors regardless of how well they have learned to anticipate and navigate the myriad hazards of obstetric medicine. Catching Babies charts the professional and personal struggles of those doctors. In the halls of a busy metropolitan teaching hospital, a group of OB/GYN doctors complete their residencies and embark on ambitious careers, all while trying to hold their lives together at the seams. Based on true stories from delivery rooms and labor decks, Catching Babies spins the doctors' stories into a gripping mosaic of the obsessions, the anxieties, and the heroism of doctors who have chosen to preside over life's greatest medical drama: high-risk childbirth.

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9780578798592

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Reviews

Catching Babies is an inside look at the industry that brings our babies into this world. It's a harsh world for doctors who work to make sure that every baby has a soft landing. Insightful. Gripping. Wonderful. - Lisa Sanders, MD, Author, Diagnosis Column for The New York Times Magazine & Every Patient Tells a Story A most remarkable aspect of birth is how this normal and simple act is frequently neither. In Catching Babies, Kleinke powerfully demonstrates how birth, despite advanced technologies and medical interventions, remains the center of our common human experience - usually the greatest of joys yet also tainted with occasions of unavoidable loss and misery. If ignorance is bliss, then how are young physicians molded by the realities of daily struggles to avert life's ultimate cruelties? As someone who has lived this life for twenty years, I wept often at how accurately Catching Babies portrays the elations and internal private fears shared by the women and men who dedicate their lives to serving women's health, with complex motivations, variable results and often at high cost to themselves and their families. Catching Babies also exposes the current complexities that hinder bringing balance back to a birth experience that is too often polarized. For those who want safer and more satisfying health for women, this book is a must read. - James Byrne, MD, OB/GYN Chair, Santa Clara Valley Medical Center & Clinical Associate Professor, Maternal Fetal Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine If you think Grey's Anatomy is shallow, House ridiculous, and you can't keep track of who's doing whom on Private Practice, you should read Catching Babies. J.D. Kleinke has done one of the hardest things imaginable - taken a swath of health policy, medical care issues, and ethics - and surrounded it in a novel I could not put down. On the other hand, if you love those TV medical dramas, read Catching Babies now so you can complain knowingly to your friends when Hollywood messes up the characters and the medicine in the inevitable-to-come TV series. - Matthew Holt, Co-Founder, Health 2.0 & Founder, The Health Care Blog Noted health care economist J.D. Kleinke uses the vehicle of a riveting novel to nail the American health care mess. Deeply flawed but compelling medical figures rip raw the deeply flawed American social construct, the deeply flawed medical profession, and the deeply flawed health care system through the unforgiving prism of that most elemental human activity: sexual reproduction. - George D Lundberg, MD, Editor-in-Chief, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), 1982-1999 Combining romance with political intrigue and sharp insights into healthcare delivery, economist-turned-novelist Kleinke has created a page-turner. - Peter Frishauf, Founder, Medscape The academic medical center is the largest, most complicated stage in our health care system, and Kleinke is its master dramatist. Catching Babies humanizes the manic energy and impenetrable culture of our teaching hospitals, showing us the best and worst of how we are training the next generation of specialist-physicians, often within the same few breaths. This may be the great American medical novel. - George D. Pillari, Co-Founder, Solucient

Author Information

J.D. Kleinke was a serious health care guy in Baltimore until he discovered snowboarding, hang gliding, jam bands, and the raw spiritual power of life above treeline . . . and moved to Colorado. He lived and worked there from 1997 until 2004, where he was an avid mountaineer and backcountry snowboarder and skier. J.D. is the author of Catching Babies, a medical novel, and Dudeville, a sensuous, lyrical, exuberant love story set in the American West. He also wrote Bleeding Edge and Oxymorons, two works of non-fiction about the American health care system. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and dozens of business and medical publications.

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