This is a really good book. It helps to have a book like this to read when you feel like all hope is gone. It's still there you just have to call on God and wait for Him. It's not an easy road to travel, but don't give up.
I received a complimentary copy from WaterBrook & Multnomah via NetGalley and was not required to write a review. All opinions expressed are my own.

I really needed this book right now. Written by W Lee Warren MD, it takes us through how a traumatic event does not become THE traumatic event. He writes from personal experience walking through an overwhelming loss of his son and also professional experience of walking with patients through life altering diseases. He writes about how faith and hope will shape our experience and how we can hold on to hope to bring us through, changed, maybe even scared, but transformed, not destroyed.

I like that this is a real life story. Dr. Warren doesn't pretend to have it all together. If you have had hard times, you will relate to what he says.

I hope that you find hope.
You have to read the book to find out, and some times it's good to read a book more than once. This is one of those books.

Slow down your life and find hope.

Hope is the first dose was given as a early review and I have read I've seen the End of you by Warren.
This was a book of hope in the midst of heartbreak and trials. Hope is what is needed as you deal with life in the hospital.

“Hope is the First Dose” written by Air Force veteran and neurosurgeon Dr. W. Lee Warren is a must-read-and-reread book. He picks up where he left off in his last book, “I’ve Seen the End of You.” Dr. Warren returns to the scene of his son’s Mitchell’s death and talks about what happened as he and his family spent time in the refining fire of the “furnace of suffering.” He lost more than his son that Aug. 20, 2013. He lost himself for awhile and life as he knew it. He said he needed to change his mind in order to change his life. He needed to help his family find a way to heal.

Dr. Warren served as a combat surgeon in the Iraq War and suffered from PTSD, which he talked about in his book, “No Place to Hide.” In “I’ve Seen the End of You,” he saw himself much like Cole in “The Sixth Sense”: he saw dead people in the faces of patients diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). Dr. Warren struggled with how to encourage his patients to pray and not give up, even though GBM told him their demise was fast approaching. He took readers on rounds as he met with patients. Medicine and surgery would not save them on this side of Heaven, but how his patients thought about their illness made a difference in the quality of the time they had left. If they allowed “stinkin’ thinkin’" into their minds, they would be part of the walking dead.

He wrote the last chapter in that book after he suffered The Massive Thing (TMT): the unexplainable death of his son Mitchell. The TMT enrolled him and his family as unwilling students in a graduate course on human suffering. “Hope is the First Dose” is a memoir and companion to “I’ve Seen the End of You.” Dr. Warren tells the story of his family’s unholy week after the death of Mitchell. He shares the raw truth with a mix of anger, dark humor, and heart-bursting gratitude for his family and all the people who circled the wagons. He uses the creation story in Genesis to talk about those dark days. Mitchell’s death and burial marked two new beginnings, one devastatingly brutal and one abiding in hope. They buried their son while their oldest Caitlyn was in labor with their first grandchild, Scarlett. Dr. Warren writes about the emotional overload of darkness and light. He ended the four days after Mitch died with “and there was evening, and there was morning,” in keeping with the structure of their family’s new unimaginable recreation story.

Dr. Warren likened the time of his TMT to pulling the yellow handle in the cockpit of a T-37. Pilots know not to pull that yellow handle until the plane is at a safe altitude. TMTs don’t care about altitude or safety. In His grace, God ensures safe landing for the Christian, he said, and we can’t change our minds about our trauma on our own. Hope comes in a syringe of grace given by the Great Physician, he said, as memories of God’s faithfulness in the past, His provision, and His promises motivate us to move forward in faith after our TMT.

Dr. Warren studied and took notes as he watched how his patients, friends and family responded when their Weltanschauung, or worldview, fell apart. Each of us will have our personal TMTs, he said, that will bring devastatingly painful, life-altering changes. How we think about our TMT is going to decide our quality of life. He said we will need to learn how to do “self-brain surgery”: changing our minds to change our lives. He worked to reconcile these two truths in Scriptures that Jesus Christ promised:

“I have told you all this so that you may have peace in me. Here on earth, you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart because I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33), also “The thief’s purpose is to steal and kill and destroy. My purpose is to give them a rich and satisfying life.” (John 10:10)

Jesus wants us to have an abundant life, but He also knows we will have trials and sorrows. Dr. Warren learned a “reliable, repeatable method” to help him and us recover and rehabilitate after our TMT. Warren collected data on people’s response after TMTs. He saw people fall in one of four camps. Crashers are those whose TMT becomes the single thing that defines their lives. They crash emotionally, never to recover, like the walking dead. Dippers start high on the chart and then dip low with the TMT. They stay low for a while, but then they end up high on the chart regardless of the outcome of their circumstances. Untouchables are bulletproof, Dr. Warren said. They do not experience significant changes to their emotions or faith, even in the face of death. Climbers surprised him the most, he said. Usually, this group lived a life of hardship with many traumas, such as abuse, past illnesses, or addiction. Climbers would tell him their best year had been the last one before they passed.

Dr. Warren referred to 2 Cor. 10:5 when talking about how to be a self-brain surgeon. “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” He said we need to do a biopsy on intrusive thoughts as those come into our minds. Ask whether what we are thinking is a true or a false statement? Thoughts on their own are not dangerous and life-threatening initially, but if we allow malignant ones to stay, then we will die before our body is in the grave. You can teach yourself to “take every thought captive in Christ.” If a thought is a true, but painful one, he shows how we can treat the malignant thought even then. While we acknowledge the sad truth, we can connect that statement with an equally true one that fits the apostle Pauls’ definition in that it is “honorable,” “right,” and “worthy of praise” in Phil. 4:8-9.

I will say I noticed his feedback on what not to do when someone has lost a loved one, especially a child. People are not ready to hear, “God will work all things for good,” “God has a purpose for this,” “God must have needed your loved one up there.” Some are true statements, but the timing is very bad. In that raw moment, those words become insensitive, empty Christian platitudes, he said. During the first few weeks after Mitch died, people also dropped off books for him to read. He’s a reader, so he said he’s not knocking how helpful books can be, but again, it’s the timing.

Finally, “Hope is the First Dose” is a love story. Dr. Warren talked about how God came through for him and all the ways He equipped him over the course of his life in medicine. God continues to lead the Warren family and bless them abundantly you’ll learn as you read. Dr. Warren has a wonderful blended family and his relationship with his wife is, well, swoon-worthy really. He worked hard on this treatment plan not just for himself, but because he needed to do something that would benefit his family and strengthen their faith in the process.

What is hope? It is our need to have something to look forward to. In this book, “Hope is the first dose: a treatment plan for trauma, tragedy, and other massive things,” Dr. Warren, a practicing neurosurgeon, shares a roadmap for achieving hope when it seems as if everything is lost. Dr. Warren has first-hand knowledge of tragedy and trauma not only in his professional life, but his personal life. In this book, Dr. Warren gives you a game plan for recovering hope when it appears as if hope is impossible. Dr. Warren provides insight on how to perform “self-brain surgery” in order to create a life changing mental shift. He knows and acknowledges that performing “self-brain surgery” is much more difficult than engaging in bad habits, and negative self-soothing behaviors such as: addictions, distractions, and pushing away of feelings. However, he provides tangible evidence as to why it is important to change our minds so that we can get past the traumas that we’ve suffered and gain that feeling of hope and happiness. This book is a valuable read for anyone that is seeking hope, has suffered trauma, and is ready to make a lasting change. Thank you the publisher and NetGalley for the advance review copy in exchange for my honest review.