Something for the Pain

Compassion and Burnout in the ER

25 August 2009

Territory Rights — Worldwide.

Description

"A stunning account of the chaos of the emergency room" (Boston Globe) for fans of The Pitt or anyone interested in the inner workings of today's healthcare system.

“At this time of the morning—two, three, four o’clock—lonely people seek solace in the fluorescent light of the emergency room. If you’ve been to a twenty-four-hour grocery store late at night, you may have seen the same people. They hesitate, put a can of soup back on the shelf, then take it down again and put it back in the cart. Refugees from the daylight world, they move with the timidity of those whose lives don’t mesh with others’. Night is the time when the lucky people get to sleep. But toothaches throb more in the dark, and backaches become unbearable. People in pain abandon their restless beds and flee their empty kitchens. They go out into the night, in search of comfort.”

These are the words of Paul Austin, as he introduces the reader to the men and women—eccentric and well-adjusted, drunk and sober—who make up a day’s work in the ER. From describing the process of issuing a death certificate for a man who shot himself in the head to attending a child in trauma from a car accident, to finding the cause of an elderly man’s fever, Austin paints a vivid picture of life in the ER and its effects on an ER doctor.

In his eye-opening account, Austin recalls how the daily grind of long, erratic shifts and endless lines of patients with sad stories sends him down a path of bitterness and cynicism. His own life becomes Exhibit A, as he details the emotional detachment that estranges him from himself and his family. Gritty, powerful, and ultimately redemptive, Austin’s memoir is a revealing glimpse into the fragility of compassion and sanity in the industrial setting of today’s hospitals.

Reviews

"It turns out there are all kinds of things about working in an ER that most of us haven’t learned from TV or having sat in one. In Something for the Pain, Paul Austin—the ER doc you’d hope to get if something really bad happened—tells us, vividly and with uncommon candor, how, if you aren’t careful, saving people’s lives can make you sick." — Ted Conover, author of Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing

"The searing honesty of Something for the Pain makes the heart glad and breaks it at the same time. Austin’s clarity is sobering; his humanity is simply staggering. This chronicle is the unsentimental account of a man who has seen men and women at their worst—and at their best. He has been to the Valley of the Shadow of Death but refused to stay there. Reading Dr. Paul Austin’s riveting story makes me proud to be a human being." — Randall Kenan, author of The Fire This Time

"In these fast-paced and extremely dramatic vignettes, Paul Austin puts us in the middle of the harrowing work that emergency room doctors and nurses face around the clock…Something for the Pain is remarkable for its compassion, humanity, and scrupulous honesty." — Michael Collier, author of Dark Wild Realm

"Moving, troubling, and revelatory, Something for the Pain offers intimate glimpses of the behind-the-scenes human costs of one man’s work in the ER. With his honesty, need, frustration, and humanity, Austin is a narrator you can trust, and he tells a story of disturbing power." — Joy Castro, author of The Truth Book

"Something for the Pain has everything you want in a medical memoir: urgencies, emergencies, life-or-death. Austin, writer as much as physician, can turn the simplest procedure into an occasion for elegy, paean, or profound meditation, phrased with the elegance of a Thoreau. Blood, yes, and pain aplenty—this is a book about the body. But it is also about the spirit, about trauma in all its definitions, about what it costs to heal and be a healer, what it truly means to save a life." — David Bradley, author of The Chaneysville Incident

"Buy this book! I simply could not put the book down. These are not Hollywood rewritten vignettes…This is real-life emergency medicine…Buy it, read it, share it, and enjoy!" — Academic Emergency Medicine

"This vivid memoir of an ER doctor will make readers by turns cry and cringe. A definite page-turner and a riveting debut." — Library Journal (starred review)

"[A] relentlessly honest look at modern emergency medicine…What makes this inspiring medical memoir stand out is the courageous measure of Austin’s humanity." — Publishers Weekly

"Austin examines the diametrically opposed perils of cynical detachment and overemotional involvement, pondering the question of just how empathic a clinician can be and still be competent. An ER physician gives serious thought to what he does, how he does it and what it does cost him." — Kirkus Reviews

Paperback

9780393337792

140 x 211 mm • 304 pages

£12.99

Add to Basket

Standalone Ebook

9780393063141

COMING SOON