Something For The Pain by Paul Austin
August 8th, 2009Title: Something for the Pain
Author: Dr. Paul Austin
Publisher: WW Norton (2008)
As observant readers of Letters on Pages may know, I am a fan of medical memoirs. I am always drawn to the fascinating stories that doctors have…and they tend to be surgeons. Atul Gawande’s book, Better, was incredibly good as it had fantastic stories but also applied to life outside of the hospital. So with high expectations I sat down to read this medical memoir…and it did not disappoint!
Something for the Pain: Compassion and Burnout in the ER by Dr. Paul Austin was a very honest look at life as an ER doctor. This book really focused more on Austin’s emotions than the stories. Obviously there are a lot of good stories in it, but they are only there to illustrate Austin’s reactions and humanity as a doctor.
The most illustrative story…and heartbreaking…happens early in the book when a patient comes in with his wife and is experiencing chest pain. This is very common in the ER. Austin took a look and ran the normal tests. When everything came back fine, he was supposed to send him home. But something didn’t feel right to him. He wanted to keep him overnight for observation and more tests. Austin called the attending physician to try to convince him that the patient should stay. The attending disagreed and recommended the patient be sent home and go see his regular doctor the next day. Austin sent the man home, but something felt off.
The next shift Austin came in to find out the patient had returned to the hospital at 4:30 in the morning with a major heart attack and died. Obviously Austin felt extremely guilty. He knew something was wrong…but sent the man home to his death anyway. I can’t even imagine the guilt that would cause! Other doctors told him it was OK and that mistakes happen, but that’s a pretty significant mistake. This story highlights the rest of the book as he struggles with the strange hours of working in the ER. He does a very nice job of expressing how he was feeling and what he was thinking during these times.
If you are interested in medical memoirs, you will likely enjoy this book. But if you would rather not know that your doctors are regular people and struggle with the life changing decisions that have to make…then you should probably skip it. I’m glad I read it though!
Rating: 4 out of 5
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August 23rd, 2009 at 8:06 am
this one sounds pretty great. thanks for posting about it.
August 29th, 2009 at 9:31 pm
I enjoyed reading this book too, I linked my review above. Another medical memoir you may enjoy is Hot Lights, Cold Steel: Life, Death and Sleepless Nights in a Surgeon’s First Years by Michael Collins – it’s his experience as a first year orthopedic surgery intern at the Mayo Clinic. I’d also read his 2nd book, Blue Collar Blue Scrubs: The Making of a Surgeon, which is almost like a prequel about how he decided to go to medical school while working in construction. So this one is more inspirational rather than straightly medical.
PS – glad to see a non-fiction book review blog! Don’t see many of such blogs. I do read some fictions though but nowadays mostly non-fiction.