Julia's Mother
Life Lessons in the Pediatric ER
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A real-life pediatric emergency room doctor reveals the trials, heartbreaks, and triumphs of his work.
It's a place of intense human drama, life's highest hopes and deepest despairs. A place we rarely get to see through a doctor's eyes.
But now the emergency room at a children's hospita is revealed in a moving and personal notembook by William Bondio, MD. It recounts the lessons a doctor learns beyond the textbooks, revealing insights into the human condition at its most vulnerable and courageous moments--from the patient who, after intense medical therapy, gives up the will to live, to the sick newborn baby who never would. We feel the power of a mother's instinct to advocate for her handicapped child, and observe the wisdom of an immigrant father who intuitively senses things the doctors cannot. Finally, with the mother of a young patient named Julia we share in the nobility of a parent's unending search to find meaning in tragedy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
These artfully written, real-life narratives about what goes on in a pediatric emergency room detail one doctor's devotion to medicine and patient care. The eponymous episode concerns the death of six-year-old Julia, from injuries she sustained in a traffic accident. A year after Julia's death, her mother contacted Bonadio to ask if he knew whether she had actually arrived at the ER before the moment of her daughter's death--i.e., had her daughter died alone? Bonadio (a doctor at the Children's Hospital of St. Paul, Minn.) poignantly describes groping for words to reassure the grieving parent that her bond with Julia had not been broken by her death. It's this sort of humane medicine, learned anew each day, that the author recounts here--a process informed by his conviction that "parents know certain things about their children in a way the doctor can never know." He convincingly explains that even the most competent doctors can misread an X-ray or make other mistakes because of the exhaustion that comes at the end of an emergency room shift. (After reading the X-rays of one child who was sent home by another ER physician, he remembers, he found a fracture in her second vertebral bone. Fortunately, he reached the family and had the child immobilized and taken back to the hospital before further damage was done.) Bonadio also details the exercise and diet routines that he follows before the beginning of an overnight ER shift and the agonizing process of deciding when to abandon a resuscitation effort on a critically ill child. This is a deeply moving memoir by a physician who clearly loves his work.
Customer Reviews
What a great insight into the life of a Pediatric EM Doc
Dr Bonadio writes a riveting memoir about his life as an Er Doc. It almost feels like you are right there with him.
This book is not only for those in medicine but for those who want to understand the strains on a PEM physician as well as the reasons for why they do what they do. Helping children and their families come above anything else.
An outstanding read which I'm sure I'll read again many times in the years to come.