A young moth­er dying on the wait­ing list in front of her two small chil­dren. A father with a rare form of lung can­cer who has been turned down for a trans­plant by sev­er­al hos­pi­tals. A teenag­er who was con­sid­ered not ​“smart enough” to be wor­thy of a trans­plant. A woman dies because a sur­geon pro­vides the wrong donor lung. The days and nights wait­ing for donor organs to become avail­able, aware of the painful real­i­ty that some­one needs to die so that anoth­er patient could live.

These are some of the sto­ries in Exhale, a riv­et­ing mem­oir about Dr. Weil­l’s ten years spent direct­ing the lung trans­plant pro­gram at Stan­ford and the very human endeav­or of trans­plan­ta­tion per­formed by peo­ple with pow­er­ful attrib­ut­es and pro­found flaws.

Exhale is an inside look at the world of high-stakes med­i­cine, the mir­a­cle of trans­plan­ta­tion, the bat­tle patients endure to sur­vive, and the sto­ry of a doc­tor’s even­tu­al recog­ni­tion that he need­ed to step away from the front lines.