Taking Care of Your Own: Parenthood and the Medical Mind

by Perri Klass

How can a person be a responsible doctor and a responsible parent? How do doctors cope with the illnesses of their own children? Is there a solution to the competition for time? Where does the personal-professional boundary lie? In this book, Dr. Perri Klass explores a subject rarely touched on in the professional the connections between medicine and parenthood. She observes that the roles can overlap in unexpected "Will I ever forget what it was like watching my own daughter get fluoroscoped---watching her heart beat inside her ribs, and thinking with confusion of what I knew about systole and diastole." Dr. Klass tells of a terrified medical student unable to recall any of his pediatrics training during his wife's difficult labor. And she addresses the concerns of children who grow up knowing that at any moment the sound of a beeper may call a parent away.

77 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Perri Klass is a pediatrician who writes fiction and non-fiction. She writes about children and families, about medicine, about food and travel, and about knitting. Her newest book is a novel, The Mercy Rule, and the book before that was a work of non-fiction, Treatment Kind and Fair: Letters to a Young Doctor, written in the form of letters to her older son as he starts medical school.
She lives in New York City, where she is Professor of Journalism and Pediatrics at New York University, and she has three children of her own. She is also Medical Director of Reach Out and Read, a national literacy organization which works through doctors and nurses to promote parents reading aloud to young children.
source: www.perriklass.com