Your Critically Ill Child: Life and Death Choices Parents Must Face

by Christopher Johnson

Perhaps the most difficult words parents will ever hear are "Your child is critically ill." Now Dr. Christopher Johnson, the former director of Mayo Clinic's Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, gives parents a helpful guide to answering the painful questions that come when a child is critically ill. The book's opening chapter lays out the full array of treatments that today's medical science can offer to severely ill children. The author then details what the technological limits are and how parents must sometimes think out of the box to save a child's life. To illustrate each chapter, Johnson draws on cases from his own practice, telling of children who beat the odds — a good reminder to parents that miracles do happen.

224 pages, Paperback

First published March 2, 2007

About the author

Christopher Johnson, an independent verbal branding consultant, received his PhD in linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, and has worked at Lexicon, one of the country's top naming firms. He lives in Seattle, Washington.