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Title: When the Air Hits Your Brain

Subtitle: Tales from Neurosurgery

Author: Frank T Vertosick Jr. MD

Narrator: Kirby Heyborne

Format: Unabridged

Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins

Language: English

Release date: 09-06-16

Publisher: Tantor Audio

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 1787 votes

Genres: Science & Technology, Medicine

Publisher's Summary:

With poignant insight and humor, Frank Vertosick, Jr., MD, describes some of the greatest challenges of his career, including a six-week-old infant with a tumor in her brain, a young man struck down in his prime by paraplegia, and a minister with a .22-caliber bullet lodged in his skull. Told through intimate portraits of Vertosick's patients and unsparing-yet-fascinatingly detailed descriptions of surgical procedures, When the Air Hits Your Brain - the culmination of decades spent struggling to learn an unforgiving craft - illuminates both the mysteries of the mind and the realities of the operating room.

Critic Reviews:

"A riveting report that shatters the mystique of the brain surgeon as a wizard of technical prowess." (

Publishers Weekly)

Members Reviews:

Sensitive and Enlightening

I appreciate the respectful and sensitive way the author, a neurosurgeon, talks about the patients who were a big part of his training and practice. I appreciate the enlightening level of detail about the procedures and customs that create doctors, good patient outcomes, and poor patient outcomes. I highly recommend this book.

Finished in 1 and 1/2 days

One of the best medical books written, imho. Empathetic, yet aware of irreconcilable errors. Funny and honest. I'm not sure I would ever want to go to him or someone trained by him in an ethically complex situation, but if my treatment only required skill and someone I could laugh with and relate to before I could be healed, I would go to him without hesitation.

How a neurosurgeon deals with issues of the Brain and Heart

Whether good timing or destiny brought Dr. Vertosick into the field of neurosurgery, this book promises an explanation of the birth and evolution of a doctor who ends up in the right place. If doctors have a "calling" to their profession, it is most certainly demonstrated in this story.

Neurosurgeons may appear to be blunt, unapologetic superheroes (as they are better with matters of the brain, rather than the heart), but these professionals rise to the top of their fields , sparing no emotions, especially their own, to give people everything. Putting excessive emotions in the back seat is a part of caring for the patient who is a less than a millimeter away from death during an operation. Pushing the boundaries of what it is means to be alive, dead and human , they play with the most valuable organ in the human body hoping to preserve and salvage what it means to be human.

This book lifts away the blanket of mysticism that covers these heroic servants to show us that even superman fails, cries, shuts down, and breaks. I enjoyed every part of peeking over the surgeon's shoulder and into his heart.

Amazing!

Im an RN and learned so much from this but enjoyed most the victories achieved! I never wanted to put it down!

C fifty-six? Really?!

As a physical therapist, I love a good medical story, and this is an excellent one. When the Air Hits Your Brain is interesting mix of medicine, the people who practice it, and the people they treat.

The narrator does a good job. Except - early in the book he repeatedly narrates, "C fifty-six". How did no one catch this?! There are only seven cervical vertebrae. The author was referencing the disc between the fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae. As such, the narrator should have said, "C five-six".