Complications: A Doctor's Love Story

This is the beautiful and true life love story of mid life soul mates finding each other at last, only to have their love challenged by insurmountable odds that even the most wide eyed optimist would find daunting. But Linda Gromko is not some wide eyed altruistic optimist. She's the real deal.

Two successful, productive, middle age longtime single parents fall in love and begin weaving their lives together. Outgoing and fun-loving, Steve Williams is a business executive with a 9 year old daughter and a large network of family and friends from the audio electronics and fitness equipment industries. More introverted and compassionate, former nurse Dr. Linda Gromko has a 27 year old adult son, an 85 year old mother, and a close-knit staff in her small urban family medicine practice, through which she has become engaged in GLBT issues. Even before they marry Steve suffers major medical problems, acute and chronic kidney failure. Over a six-year series of life-threatening health crises, he loses many things that had been most important to him: his career; active engagement in the daily life of his daughter and her friends; a beautiful Bainbridge Island home custom designed and frequently used for entertaining; good food, travel and other joys of a robust, affluent and interesting life. Linda is thrown into her special hell: having to divert attention from her intimate neighborhood medical practice to confront top levels of high-tech specialized medicine in two of the largest, most prestigious but most bureaucratic institutions in the region, not as an esteemed colleague but as advocate for her vulnerable husband. Dr. Gromko does not try to hide the fact that, exhausted by all this, neither is always at his or her cheerful, cooperative, optimistic best. But their love grows. His family and friends provide amazing comfort and support. He becomes interested in her issues and her writing. Her son eventually becomes a primary caregiver for his dying stepfather and a friend for his teenage stepsister. Although several of Linda's staff members encounter their own serious medical problems, they pull together to keep her clinic serving patients with little help from their employer, the only doctor. Linda taps into deep reserves of courage and stamina not only to care for Steve but also to take on a new cause--trying to help specialized medical providers become more compassionate and effective. Her two books on their ordeal, "Complications: a Doctor's Love Story," and "Let Me Go When the Banter Stops: A Doctor's Fight for the Love of Her Life," and her other writings, blogs and public speeches are part of that effort.

In our society many of the smartest, hardest working, most highly trained and motivated people focus on narrow specialties, providing technical wizardry but too often lacking in human compassion and social skills needed to work effectively with others, including colleagues and the very people they are trying to help. This is not unique to medicine; it also happens in law, business, politics, even nonprofit organizations. Through her heartbreaking but inspiring true love story, Dr. Gromko has diagnosed and provides perceptive insights into social problems far bigger than the medical profession.

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I found Linda Gromko's Love Story to be very well written, and very touching as well. Steve Williams is an aquaintence of mine from my college years and although I knew of his current condition, I had no idea of the trials and tribulations that one on dialysis must endure. Linda and Steve's daughter (Brita) are saints for loving, caring, and helping Steve through this journey. Having a few medical issues of my own, I found this a "feel good read". It is a tribute to love and friendship between a man and his wife and family. I look forward to the rumored sequil.

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I read this book because I'm working on computer software related to ESRD. I was looking for a book that would help me understand what the ESRD patients were living through, what their concerns were, what their lives were like.

Well, this book provided all that and more. It is an incredibly honest love story, well written, reads like a novel. Congratulations to Dr. Gromko for making the experience of ESRD understandable for those of us who have not had to deal with it.

I wish her and her family the best of luck but i think they have found their own luck and love.

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Dr. Gromko's wonderfully crafted book is a portrait of genuine love between her and her husband Steve, as they battle through life together against his end-stage kidney disease. Their love is genuine--not "LOVE" to get the wedding, or "LOVE" to get the babies, but love in its purest and richest of meanings, with sacrifice, compromise, laughter, mutual devotion and neverending hope. Her book is a treasure.