One Hundred Days

Book excerpt: So writes David Biro, a young doctor who had everything going for him -- a beautiful wife, a successful medical practice, and the Ph.D. in literature he had always dreamed of -- when he was diagnosed, at thirty-one, with a rare blood disease. Of the two possible treatments, he chose the riskier one, a bone marrow transplant. As he charts his journey from doctor to patient, from professor of dermatology to high-ranking medical "zebra, " Biro brings clarity to one of the most medically complex procedures of our time. And in writing about his own fears, Biro taps into the anxieties we all feel when confronted with a medical world that though more technologically advanced than ever strikes us, at times, as confusing -- with its contradictory diagnoses -- and compassionless.Combining the self-analysis of Oliver Sack's in A Leg to Stand On with the emotional impact of Jean-Dominique Bauby's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, "One Hundred Days" is more than a physician's triumphant account of his own illness, it is a searing and, ultimately, hopeful meditation on illness and mortality, fate and the fellowship of family.