The author of Last Night in the OR: A Transplant Surgeon's Odyssey shares perspectives on the life of a transplant surgeon turned writer.

The 1980s marked a revolution in the field of organ transplants, and Dr. Bud Shaw was on the front lines. Now retired from active practice, Dr. Shaw relays gripping moments of anguish and elation, frustration and reward, despair and hope in his struggle to save patients. He reveals harshly intimate moments of his medical career: telling a patient’s husband that his wife has died during surgery; struggling to complete a twenty-hour operation as mental and physical exhaustion inch closer and closer; and flying to retrieve a donor organ while the patient waits in the operating room. Within these more emotionally charged vignettes are quieter ones, too, like growing up in rural Ohio, and being awakened late at night by footsteps in the hall as his father, also a surgeon, slipped out of the house to attend to a patient in the ER.

In the tradition of Mary Roach, Jerome Groopman, Eric Topol, and Atul Gawande, Last Night in the OR is an exhilarating, fast-paced, and beautifully written memoir, one that will captivate readers with its courage, intimacy, and honesty. Dr. Shaw's talk will reflect upon how  writing fit into his life as a surgeon, and how it helped him deal with his loss of that part of his identity. Reflective writing played a big role in Dr. Shaw's life, and that recognition also led him to explore the literature regarding the value of reflective writing in mental wellness, including dealing with chronic illness, job stress and burnout, mild depression, loss, and grief.

Books will be available for sale and author signing courtesy of Off the Beaten Path Bookstore.

About the speaker
Bud Shaw grew up the oldest child of a general surgeon in rural south central Ohio. He graduated with an AB in Chemistry from Kenyon College in 1972 and received his MD degree from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in 1976. In 1981, he completed a surgery residency at the University of Utah, then trained in Pittsburgh under Tom Starzl, the father of liver transplantation. An internationally renowned transplant surgeon by age 35, Shaw left Pittsburgh in 1985 to start a new transplant program in Nebraska that quickly became one of the most respected transplant centers in the world. An author of 300 journal articles, 50 book chapters, and a founding editor of the prestigious journal, Liver Transplantation, he retired from active practice and the department chairmanship in 2009, and now focuses on writing, teaching and the value of narrative studies in medical education and clinical practice. His prize-winning essay, "My Night With Ellen Hutchinson," published in Creative Nonfiction Magazine, was nominated for a 2013 Pushcart Prize and received Special Mention. The father of three adult children, Shaw lives with his wife, novelist Rebecca Rotert in the wooded hills north of Omaha.

About the library's Health Perspectives Series
This is an ongoing, once-in-an-occasional series of talks, workshops and films that brings together professional expertise in nutrition, exercise and general health for free community programs at the Bud Werner Memorial Library.