Tornado of Life
MIT Press (Verlag)
978-0-262-54842-7 (ISBN)
To be an emergency room doctor is to be a professional listener to stories. Each patient presents a story; finding the heart of that story is the doctor’s most critical task. More technology, more tests, and more data won’t work if doctors get the story wrong. Empathy, creativity, and imagination are the cornerstones of clinical care. In Tornado of Life, ER physician Jay Baruch offers a series of short, powerful, and affecting essays that capture the stories of ER patients in all their complexity and messiness.
Patients come to the ER with lives troubled by scales of misfortune that have little to do with disease or injury. ER doctors must be problem-finders before they are problem-solvers. Cheryl, for example, whose story is a chaos narrative of “and this happened, and then that happened, and then, and then and then and then,” tells Baruch she is "stuck in a tornado of life.” What will help her, and what will help Mr. K., who seems like a textbook case of post-combat PTSD but turns out not to be? Baruch describes, among other things, the emergency of loneliness (invoking Chekhov, another doctor-writer); his own (frightening) experience as a patient; the patient who demanded a hug; and emergency medicine during COVID-19. These stories often end without closure or solutions. The patients are discharged into the world. But if they’re lucky, the doctor has listened to their stories as well as treated them.
Jay Baruch, a practicing emergency room physician, is Professor of Emergency Medicine at Alpert Medical School of Brown University and the author of two award-winning short fiction collections, What's Left Out and Fourteen Stories: Doctors, Patients, and Other Strangers.
Table of Contents:
Chief Complaint
Not the Beginning
Vulnerability
Tornado of Life
Backstory
Why Medicine Needs More Not-Knowing
Ambassador to Nightmares
Catheters
When Loneliness is an Emergency
Trust as Protection
Upside Down
Waiting for the Surge
Narrative Risks: Shape, Place, and Gutter
Zebras
Hug, or Ugh
Constraints
Moving on
Compassion at the Crossroads
Pain: A Story That’s Hard to Treat
There’s Dying, and Dying Now
Holding On, Letting Go
When Waiting Feels Immoral
Benefit Paradox
Unsafe Discharge
Big Incision
To Err is To Be a Physician
When Sensitivity is a Liability
Why Won’t My Patient Act Like a Jerk?
Wheelchair
Possibility
Caring for the caregiver
Oktoberfest
Dr Douchebag RW
In defense of cheaper stethoscopes
The appendix: ancient organ for the modern age
Judging patients
A knock on the door
Paper scrubs
The Ashtray
The patient who wanted nothing
Can we write a better story for ourselves?
Not an ending
One more thing, writing stories of medicine
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
| Erscheinungsdatum | 17.07.2024 |
|---|---|
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 133 x 203 mm |
| Themenwelt | Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte |
| Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Natur / Technik | |
| Medizin / Pharmazie ► Allgemeines / Lexika | |
| Medizin / Pharmazie ► Medizinische Fachgebiete ► Medizinethik | |
| Medizin / Pharmazie ► Pflege | |
| ISBN-10 | 0-262-54842-9 / 0262548429 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0-262-54842-7 / 9780262548427 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
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