I Had to Survive

October 26, 2015
Canessa was a 19-year-old medical student and rugby player at Stella Maris College in Montevideo, Uruguay, when he became famous as one of 16 people who survived a 1972 plane crash in the Andes for 72 days by eating the frozen flesh of their deceased companions. While the survivors’ collective story was captured in Alive, Piers Paul Read’s iconic 1974 book, Canessa—who went on to became a world-renowned pediatric cardiologist at the Italian Hospital of Montevideo—now draws parallels between the life-altering decisions he made on the mountain and the hope he provides to desperate parents by performing lifesaving heart surgeries on newborn infants and fetuses in utero. In this inspirational book, he recounts in breathtaking detail his harrowing journey across a harsh, uninhabited region of the Andes with fellow crash survivor Fernando Parrado to find help. Canessa references the life-and-death decisions (choosing cannibalism was his idea) that prepared him to become the most delicate of doctors. Coauthor Vierci interviewed Canessa’s family members, patients, and rescuers to connect the dots between the doctor’s survival ordeal and his medical work. The approach doesn’t result in a smooth narrative, but it makes for riveting reading.

December 15, 2015
A world-famous pediatric cardiologist tells how surviving a plane crash in the high Andes led to a lifelong commitment to helping children overcome congenital heart defects. In the fall of 1972, Canessa was a second-year medical student and member of the Uruguayan national rugby team. One afternoon, he and his rugby teammates were on a flight bound for Chile when their plane suddenly lost altitude and crashed in the Andes Mountains. (The story was the inspiration for the film Alive.) Canessa and others who survived immediately banded together into a "single organism" to face the task of tending to the injured, the dying, and the dead and making what was left of their airplane into a habitable shelter. In the midst of subzero temperatures, snowstorms, and avalanches, the survivors began to consider how they could escape from what quickly began to feel like an "icy sarcophagus." First, the group attempted to fix their damaged plane radio to try to communicate with air rescue brigades. But after days of work, they could only hear "garbled, hissing static that never turned into words." Forced into eating the flesh of those who had died to maintain their strength, the young men hatched a desperate plan for escape that involved Canessa and one other man climbing down the mountain to seek help. What makes this gripping narrative especially poignant is the way the author intercuts the memories of his experiences with the stories of those who lived through this ordeal with him, as well as those of the children he eventually helped as a doctor. For Canessa, emerging alive from that "sinister proving ground" high in the Andes marked a coming to consciousness of the true nature of survival and healing. By becoming a pediatric cardiologist, he could save the lives of the truly helpless and also honor all those, both living and dead, involved in the traumatic birth of his "second life." Readably inspiring from beginning to end.

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