Product Description

Dr. Pamela Grim has been an emergency medical physician for almost 10 years.

Now, she shares her experiences, taking the reader into the emergency room to witness first hand the dramatic circumstances of one of the world's most demanding jobs. While she ventures into the heart of the emergency room, she also delves into her own heart and mind, providing a clear picture of a caring physician whose doubts, questions, and insecurities have to be pushed aside to make split-second life and death decisions every minute of the day-all in the course of trying to save a few lives.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #133987 in Books
• Published on: 2002-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780446677578
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
In this outstanding collection of stories and "lessons," Pamela Grim, an emergency medicine physician, reveals the painful truths learned from the daily witnessing of the underside of life, where most who enter are addicts, idiots, drunks, and psychotics whose poor choices have led them to the end of the line. The ER is a more tragic, chaotic, and weird place than any TV show has ever portrayed. A man walks in with a butcher knife imbedded in his skull, a teenage girl asks incredulously, "I'm pregnant?" after delivery, and the best kind of cop dies on the table while his killer is saved in the next room. Grim brilliantly captures the adrenaline-fueled chaos of code calls in inner-city ERs, where the unrelenting pressure puts doctors and nurses alike in a perpetual state of shell shock. In this environment, doctors must make split-second decisions under the specter of malpractice suits and the knowledge that every moment weighs in on whether the patient will live or die. Fortunately, Grim is the sort of storyteller who can make a reader cry then laugh out loud in a matter of pages. She is a no-nonsense doctor--and author--whose compassion and wisdom are as unexpected and brightly illuminated as the resurrection of the 4-year-old with no pulse who was crushed by the family car.

Between the pressure and the bruises left by each death, burnout is inevitable. Grim's response is to head for Nigeria with Doctors Without Borders, and later to Bosnia and a Kosovar refugee camp, where once again she is "awestruck by the suffering God can inflict." The dearth of technology and supplies and the low survival rates make a shocking contrast to the miracles achieved in American hospitals. Grim considers some profound issues--the nature of grief, the humanitarian aid paradox in which helping out can indirectly enable corrupt governments, and the despair of trying to save lives when so many are dying. Ultimately, she realizes that the answer is in the particular; it is saving individual lives that makes her work--and life itself--meaningful. This is one powerful page-turner with the potential to change minds as well as lives. --Lesley Reed

From Publishers Weekly
An ER doctor who has spent time in Nigeria and Macedonia with Doctors Without Borders, Grim isn't just a committed physicianAshe'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. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School-In clear, crisp prose, Grim describes life in the ER, from the dull monotony of "documenting" charts to the rush of adrenaline and fear when a routine procedure becomes a race against death. On her first night on her first real job as a doctor in an ER, she delivered her first baby. Dr. Grim has seen it all-from teenagers with gunshot wounds and suicide victims addicted to drugs prescribed by negligent doctors to the stoic farmer's wife, with pain "like an elephant sitting on her chest," who just wants to go home and feed the cat. Needing a change, she volunteered for Medecins sans Frontieres and desperately tried to help Bosnian refugees survive a war and Nigerians fight a meningitis epidemic without the proper medical tools or supplies. She tried to ease the wracking pain of a Nigerian patient with tetanus with only a medical text written in 1964. In the war zone of a big city ER, Dr. Grim doesn't see the glamour and camaraderie portrayed on prime-time television. She sees doctors who are putting in time, doctors who are criminally negligent, and doctors who want out. Even she asks, "Do I want to spend the rest of my life with addicts and idiots and drunks and psychotics?" This is an eye-opening description of the ER for future health-care workers.-Jane S. Drabkin, Chinn Park Regional Library, Prince William, VA

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Occasionally interesting but often depressing
While the middle third of this book is interesting, the rest of it is rather dull and depressing. That's not surprising since the author's pilgrimage was precipitated by her melancholy and disappointment with life as an ER physician in America. As an ER doctor, I can certainly sympathize with her discontent, but I am nevertheless shocked that such a glum book was published. Although it is true that any accurate portrayal of ER medicine is bound to include much negativity, Dr. Grim (how utterly apropos, by the way) could have tempered her pervasively gloomy account with an occasional ray of sunshine.

In addition to making readers reach for their Prozac, there's a lot about this book that I didn't like. First, the quality of writing was annoying. Second, I repeatedly had the feeling that her smattering of interesting stories were overly embellished and hence not entirely believable. Third, Dr. Grim leaves readers wondering if she's still working in the ER or is now doing hair transplants. The central question in this book is whether Grim can shake her disaffection with ER medicine and keep working in that field, or whether she decides to accept a job offer from a friend to perform hair transplants and other cosmetic procedures. Fourth, this book is by no means a complete or even passably complete narrative of what it is like to be an ER physician.

The ninth circle of hell
The ninth circle of hell in this autobiography of emergency room physician Pamela Grim is the South Side of Chicago. When she burns out trying to heal the unceasing stream of addicts, assault victims, and alcoholics who flood into her emergency room, she joins Médecins sans Frontières and descends even further into what might be the modern tenth and eleventh circles of hell: Bosnia in the depths of war and genocide; and Africa during a meningitis epidemic.

Grim, indeed. This is not a book to read if you're already feeling depressed. I thought I wouldn't have a problem with this story because I'd been watching that interesting and horrifying bit of reality T.V. called, "Trauma: Life in the E.R." Now I realize that even though 'Trauma' viewers see everything from surgeons rooting around in a gunshot victim's intestines to ER physicians trying to save an eyeball that has popped out of an accident victim's head, reality T.V. doesn't come close to Dr. Grim's reality.

Some of her saddest cases, in Chicago at least, involve babies born to cocaine-addicted, alcoholic mothers who don't come into contact with a physician until they're giving birth. Babies in America aren't usually born in an emergency room--except when Dr. Grim happens to be moonlighting in a hospital that doesn't have an obstetrician on site, or when the mother is wheeled into ER with two bullets through her brain. In one of the most gruesome episodes in this book, she assists in the birth of an anencephalic baby: "There was a rivulet of fluid, and then this 'thing' slithered out onto the cart..."

Never mind. At least the babies in Chicago don't die of tetanus like they still do in Africa. In her preface to the chapter, "How to Treat Tetanus," Dr. Grim quotes from the Qu' aran:

Also a sign for them is that we bear their progeny on the laden ship. / If we will, we drown them, / and there is no helper for them/ nor are they saved, unless as a mercy from us...

There is very little mercy in this chapter about a Nigerian police officer who dies of a treatable, preventable disease that Dr. Grim never experienced in all of her years in Chicago. She does what she can for the man, scrounging medicine from her meningitis cases, taping "TOUCH THIS IV AND YOU DIE" to the man's IV, even transporting him from the Médecins sans Frontières field clinic to a 'tetanus hospital' ten miles away. The so-called 'hospital' had no medicine, no beds, not even a dark, quiet place for him to die. Some of the author's most poignant musings occur while she is travelling with the dying man. She thinks about the equipment, techniques, and medicine that would have been able to treat this man in America--even on the South Side of Chicago.

This is a profoundly moving book.

a grear look at emergancy room life
In "Just here trying to save a few lives" Dr. Pamela Grim paints us a vivid picture of life in the ER. As an EMT student I found the book captivating and informative. The book started a little slow but quickly picked up the pace. As we travel with Dr. Grim from hospital to hospital and from country to country we see the struggles and trials that doctors face every day. There was a lot of medical language that, had I not been an EMT student I would have not understood but would still be able to follow the story. Overall this was a very good book and I would recommend it to any one interested in going in to the medical filed or to anyone who is curious of what doctors face in their profession.