When Jeff Conant, executive director of San Francisco's Frameline Film Festival, dives off the Golden Gate Bridge, he's considered just another statistic - until an independent filmmaker's camera on the bridge reveals that Jeff's death was neither accident nor suicide.

There are moments in life when we are knocked off our usual balance, our normalcy, and from that vantage point we can view life in general, and our own lives in particular, at a different level. This is a simple story about one person's decision to draw out the best from a difficult experience and to use a dramatic break in the regular routine of life as a learning experience about elevating one's life. The story is based upon a surgical experience and a thinker's response to it. The approach also would apply to other experiences like losses of jobs, deaths of loved ones, burning down of houses, spousal affairs, children's serious illnesses, economic setbacks and any other fracture of the usual activities of life. If the opportunity to elevate your life through creative response to trauma comes to you, the reader, you might respond through different creative endeavors, by painting, perhaps, or composing, or dancing, or building things, or working, or gardening. The message, however, is still the same: step into the experience, be assured that there is meaning in it for you, ask what you can learn from it, and know that your life will be deepened by both the experience and your response to it. This is a book about responding to unexpected, unusual, and traumatic experiences in life. Another personal story with deep philosophical insight from Dr. Diane Harvey, the author of DOCTOR, PATIENT, OBJECT, THING: A Story about a Surgeon and a Teacher.

"The surgeon bounded into my life uninvited. He was thirty-nine, talented, charming, and a self-proclaimed yuppie. I was sixty-two, a successful academic, popular with my students, and a self-proclaimed teacher. We had little in common, my surgeon and I, except a vulvectomy: a surgery that he would perform and that I would undergo. The vulvectomy was well done, the relationship was not. This is the story of that relationship." Professor Diane Harvey weaves an engaging story about the relationship between a charismatic, confident, competent young surgeon in his late thirties and a popular, award-winning senior professor of philosophy. At first, the young man is her surgeon. As the story enfolds, she becomes his teacher. The purpose of the story is to share the sensitive surgical journey of a patient with others, especially those who are undergoing or have undergone personal female surgeries such as hysterectomies, mastectomies, and vulvectomies, and to engage the reader in a discussion about the effect on the patient of "assembly-line surgery" in which the patient is treated by the surgeon as an object. While the emphasis is on personal female surgeries, any reader, male or female, who has undergone or is facing a surgery for life-threatening conditions, will be interested in the relationship between the surgeon and the patient. Certainly, however, this book is a "must-give" to your mother, sister, adult daughter, wife, lover, or partner and to any friend traveling the surgical journey.