Saving: A Doctor’s Struggle to Help His Children

"Candidly engaging, emotional poignant, impressively informative, and ultimately inspiring, Saving: A Doctor's Struggle to Help His Children is an extraordinary memoir and one that will be of extraordinary interest to anyone facing the often daunting task of securing appropriate and adequate health care for their own families." — Midwest Book Review

Why do we fall ill? How do we get better?

When his two-year-old develops epilepsy, Shane Neilson, a doctor, struggles to obtain timely medical care for his son. Saving shares his family's journey through the medical system, and also Shane's own personal journey as a father who feels powerless when faced with his child's illness. It entwines these stories with Shane's personal history of mental illness as a child and his professional experience with disability.

By exploring the theme of family, Shane Neilson manages to show that, over time, it is possible to not only escape the wreckage of the past, but to celebrate living with disability in the present.

"Shane Neilson is a brilliant writer ... There hasn’t been such a poignant and harrowing memoir of fatherhood in Canada since Ian Brown's The Boy in The Moon." — Karen Connelly, author of The Change Room