Just Here Trying to Save a Few Lives
Tales of Life and Death from the ER
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- S/ 37.90
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- S/ 37.90
Descripción editorial
With unflinching honesty, an ER doctor tells readers what it's really like to be a caring physician with one of the most demanding, exhilarating, frustrating, and rewarding jobs in the world.
An emergency medicine physician for nearly a decade, Dr. Pamela Grim has delivered babies, treated heart attacks, saved car accident victims, comforted the dying, and consoled the living who were left behind. She has worked all over the world, caring for victims of gang life in America's inner cities, victims of the war in Bosnia, poverty-stricken patients in Nigeria, and bank presidents in the United States.
Relating these rich and varied experiences with compelling prose, Dr. Grim takes readers into the E.R. and lets them experience first-hand what it takes to make split-second, life-and-death decisions in the course of an average day.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An ER doctor who has spent time in Nigeria and Macedonia with Doctors Without Borders, Grim isn't just a committed physician--she's a kind of philosopher of life and death. In her first book, she tracks how it feels to repeatedly witness sickness and death. She tells tales about the alarmingly high mortality rates she encountered in Africa during a meningitis epidemic; the premature, barely breathing and crack-addicted babies she's delivered; the victims of automobile accidents and child abuse and street violence she's treated in the ER. In terse, understated language, Grim explains what motivated her to do this work (her mother was an alcoholic) and how she got burnt out (which ironically led to her decision to go abroad, where she'd imagined the pace would be slower). Along the way, she conveys both the day-to-day experience of doctoring and the broader difficulties of providing medical services in countries where poverty means basic medical supplies are not available. "I know how it is to be angry," she writes. "All the other emotions just get in the way of being a doctor." Therein lies her strength but also her weakness: she makes clear the development of her defense mechanisms; the more she witnesses brutality, the more she retreats from the grief that overwhelms her when a patient dies. One of these defense mechanisms is an impatient cynicism (regarding drug addicts, for instance); while this clearly has made her heroic efforts as a doctor possible, it doesn't serve her well as an author. At times a sharply brittle tone intrudes on this otherwise moving account of the medical profession's dark side.
