Catastrophic Rupture: A Memoir of Healing, Paperback

As a pediatric critical care physician and an ethicist, Jane Lee was accustomed to caring for children with a range of serious conditions and disabilities, and felt comfortable helping families navigate decision-making for these children. When a complicated delivery leaves her second child with a severe brain injury, she finds that everything she learned about disability and personhood as a physician and ethicist is no help as a parent.

This book allows the reader to walk alongside the author as she struggles to bond with and love her child, as she reconciles what is happening at home with her ongoing role as a physician to patients and families in similar circumstances, and as she shifts from the medical perspective of disability that sees an impaired body to the mother's perspective that sees the beauty and value in the person that is her child.

All author profits will be donated to the Complex Care Program at Children's Wisconsin and the Medical Humanities Program at the Medical College of Wisconsin.