He also takes us inside a recognizable family with its own weight and daily dynamic. He brings the medical details fully to life, describing the science as well as giving us portraits of doctors and nurses. Benz became a prisoner of medicine, stuck in his hometown when he wanted to go away for college, and bound to a very difficult brother who didn’t always appreciate what his sibling was doing for him.īenz tells this story with quiet realism and honesty. But the blood letting continued for weeks, then months, then years. Initiated as an emergency stopgap, the doctors thought they needed to do it for only a short time before Charley’s body stabilized or a better solution was discovered. The procedure lasted from four to six hours and was performed twice a week. The doctors began an experimental procedure where blood was taken from the healthy brother, the platelets removed with a centrifuge and then given to Charley. His bone marrow wasn’t producing the platelets needed for his blood to clot normally the slightest injury could produce serious internal or external bleeding. In 1972, when Benz was sixteen, his brother Charley was diagnosed with aplastic anemia. His father was a doctor, his mother a former nurse. The Bone Bridge (Dagmar Miura, March 2015) by Yarrott Benz is an account of a medical experience that is strange and special, yet so clearly written, involving and human that it achieves the same power as those other titles.īenz grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, the youngest of four children. I am thinking of classics like Death Be Not Proud by John Gunther, Borrowed Time by Paul Monette and The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. Every now and then, however, a good writer produces a book with the artistry and objectivity to bring a reader deep into a personal experience and render it soul-making.
You cannot doubt their sincerity, but they don’t always work as stories. The majority are painful, private accounts, akin to the bad poetry that Randall Jarrell compared to amputated limbs with “This is a poem” scrawled on them in lipstick. Medical crisis is such an important part of modern life that it’s no surprise that scores of new books about illness, loss or recovery appear each year. Yarrott Benz: On Revisiting a Harrowing Adolescence and Writing His New Memoir ‘The Bone Bridge’Īp“Whether I like it or not, the story of The Bone Bridge is the defining story of my life.”
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