Author A.H. Yurvati is a surgeon (specializing in cardiothoracic and vascular surgery) who also has a Ph.D. in Education. He has published over one hundred peer-reviewed articles, three book chapters, and one previous memoir. Titled Wet My Hands, that book tells of his diagnosis 13 years ago of multiple myeloma, an incurable disease. THIS TO ME is a 53-page sequel, but Yurvati provides no background. He just writes, “So here goes rubbish or not and my continuing saga with the dreaded Fates.”
The first chapter provides a two-page update on his present medical condition, which includes a second back surgery. Then, apropos of nothing, Chapter Two describes a trip to Puerto Rico to celebrate Yurvati’s sixty-sixth birthday. He gives some details on Puerto Rico, emphasizing that the part of the island where his mother grew up had been “confiscated” by the U.S. Navy. The following chapter deals with a 905-mile road trip he and his relatives made for his next birthday to San Antonio, noting that his “back held up and needed some additional oral steroids but powered through the driving.” Then, once he returned home, he started chemo with a bone marrow transplant in the offing.
Chapters 4 to 16 comprise brief case histories of patients Yurvati has treated. He promises that he has “attempted to explain the case so nonmedical readers can understand what I am talking about.” Yet, just two paragraphs later, he writes about someone “who sustained a left anterior descending coronary artery dissection during an angioplasty,” and the next paragraph describes another patient who had a “nonoperable aneurysm of her left iliofemoral artery.” This is really the meat of the book, but the stories here will be interesting (and understandable) mostly to medical students and doctors.
In Chapter 17, Yurvati returns to his own story, revealing that he has contracted Cushing’s Syndrome because he was being treated with cortisol, which caused him to develop Type 2 diabetes. The therapy costs $900 a month, but Yurvati writes that “[w]e were able to receive authorisation for an injectable at $100 copay per month.” He does not say how he pulled this off. Before he got sick, Yurvati competed in runs almost every month, along with bodybuilding and weightlifting. He includes a photo of himself bench-pressing (his maximum was 340 pounds) and writes that, to recover, he just needs to “start slow and hopefully progress.” As a memoir, THIS TO ME is a testament to not letting even serious health challenges get in the way of living. However, medical students and doctors will be the main audience—since the terminology is not easily grasped by anyone without medical training.
Although presented as a memoir about author A.H. Yurvati’s health challenges, most of THIS TO ME comprises medical case histories written in technical language. In that respect, health professionals should find much that is useful here.
~Kevin Baldeosingh for IndieReader