Open Heart: A Patient's Story of Life-Saving Medicine and Life-Giving Friendship.

• Author: Kellman, Steven G.
• Position: Book Review

BY JAY NEUGEBOREN HOUGHTON MIFFLIN 2003, 384 PAGES, $24.00

Sixty-year-old novelist Jay Neugeboren seemed to enjoy robust health. He Swam a mile every day, regularly played basketball and tennis against men half his age, and neither smoked nor overate. However, a fortuitous discovery that his coronary arteries were almost entirely blocked led to the quintuple--bypass surgery that saved his life.

In Open Heart, Neugeboren recounts his near--death experience, crediting his survival to the intervention of four steadfast friends who knew enough about medicine and his particular case to provide valid and timely advice. "There is no question in my mind," Rich Helfant, a leading cardiologist, tells Neugeboren, "that we wouldn't be sitting here today if you hadn't gone to high school with the right guys." Like AIDS specialist Jerry Friedland, neurologist Phil Yarnell, and psychologist Arthur Rudy, Helfant had attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn with Neugeboren. The five maintained their boyhood ties over almost 50 years, and when Neugeboren reported his symptoms, the others took charge of his care, countermanding the conclusions of his examining physicians and insisting that he receive immediate and appropriate treatment.

Luck, privilege, and love, as much as science, opened his heart and kept him alive.

Open Heart extrapolates from its author's own ordeal to offer enlightened observations about the history of medicine; education of physicians; hazards of managed care; limitations of technology; value of friendship; and relationship between mind and body...