"Extraordinary... A doctor's memoir of his struggle against his own illness...An intimate account of the remarkable medical advances of the last few decades from [a] unique point of view."
--New York Times Book Review
Download a sample chapter of Raising Lazarus.
His story is one of a nearly life-long struggle with a mortal illness, Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy, HCM (formerly known as Idiopathic Hypertrophic Subaortic Stenosis or IHSS). Dr. Pensack shares the story of his family’s battle with a genetic illness that caused his mother’s death in 1955, when he and his brother Richard were 4 and 7 years of age. She was 31 at the time of her death. He and his brother went on to become chronic research heart patients as adolescents at The National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. They both endured a litany of surgeries and cardiac arrests, i.e. multiple near death experiences. Ultimately, both he and his brother Richard received life saving heart transplants 13 and 15 years ago respectively. Their story also chronicles an epic of progress in the field of organ transplantation which dawned in 1962 at almost the same time their medical diagnosis was made, and reached full bloom in time to save them 30 years later. Remarkably and coincidently, Dr. Pensack played a vital role in that evolution by helping to produce one of the anti-rejection drugs with which he himself was treated at the time of his greatest need twenty years later. His older brother Richard, who underwent heart transplantation 2 years prior to him, is still alive, but he had to undergo a miraculous double transplant (liver and kidney) in August, 2004, in San Francisco, from which he is still recovering. His liver and kidney failure were caused by long-term complications from a previous open heart surgery and from his heart transplant.
Dr. Pensack often lectures on the role medical research has played in keeping his hope alive while he was forced to address the existential and philosophical questions surrounding his own mortality. In Raising Lazarus, he shares his journey of the mind, of the spirit, and of the emotions in dealing with the stark reality of the fragility of human life.