Saving

“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

AUTHOR

Shane Neilson

Shane Neilson is a poet, physician, literary critic, and scholar of Canadian literatures who lives with disability. He published his first review in 1998 and has had to look over his shoulder ever since. In 2012, his critical prose won Arc Poetry Magazine?s ?Critic?s Desk? award as selected by Amanda Jernigan. In 2018, his scholarly work on Canadian literature that is rooted in disability studies was awarded SSHRC?s $50,000 ?Talent? Award. In 2019, his article on the representations of pain in Canadian literature was shortlisted for Canadian Literature?s 60thAnniversary Graduate Student Essay Prize. Shane?s own poetry has received several accolades, including the Hamilton Literary Award for Poetry in 2018; The Walrus Poetry Prize in 2017, selected by Margaret Atwood; and in 2011, he was shortlisted for the Trillium Poetry Prize. Shane is an assistant professor in family medicine at McMaster University (adjunct) and he continues to practice medicine at a little clinic in Guelph, Ontario.