Healing Hearts by Dr. Hisashi Nikaidoh

Healing Hearts is an amazing book, but a hard read.  I say hard, meaning, when you are in the heart world, you realize how precious life is and how easily these children can pass away.

I may not have read this book at the right time, going to my college roommates funeral, but then, with Natalie, there may never be the right time.

Healing Hearts: A Leading Pediatric Heart Surgeon Learns about the Journey from Grief to Life from These Inspiring Mothers of His Lost Patients

For Pediatric heart surgeon Hisashi Nikaidoh, MD, a chance encounter near the hospital cafeteria would stay in his mind forever.  The woman he ran into had lost her son in this hospital years earlier.  Now she was working in the very place that had been unable to save her child's life.  Dr. Nikaidoh was stunned.  he wondered how she could tolerate coming here every day.  But respecting her privacy, he never asked the question.  After losing his own son in a tragic accident several years later, Dr. Nikaidoh struggled terribly under the weight of his own grief.  And his thoughts went back to this women.  What did she know that he could learn this loving mother who seemed to have made peace with her loss?  Healing Hearts shares eight mothers' deeply honest and gut-wrenching journeys through grief their pain, anger, attempts at solace with alcohol and bad relationships as well as their decision to honor their living children by committing to lives of service.

As you read the summary of the book, I am sure you can now figure out, why I say it is a hard read.  I am pretty sure I cried through 90% of the book, but I must say, it is purely amazing reading about not only these women, but Dr. Nikaidoh as well.

Dr. Nikaidoh recently officially retired.  I have never met him, but he performed a friend of ours son's heart surgeries.  I have mentioned that I am apart of an amazing heart group here in Amarillo.  Dr. Nikaidoh is a friend on our facebook page and has even comment with support for us all at times.  I mean, what heart surgeon do you know that is first friends on facebook with people, most of whom he has never met and then supports us as well.  

I know I said it is hard read, but I promise it is worth the reading, just have a box of Kleenex by and do not try to read it all in one day, that might be a little too hard.