In Where It Hurts, more than 60 doctors, nurses, therapists, EMTs, patient advocates, and other medical professionals offer a window into the space between health and illness, life and death as they share stories of difficult patients, life-changing diagnoses, their own failures, and the successes that make everything worth it. What they feel, we feel, in highly relatable, beautifully written essays, poems, and short stories that are by turns conversational, urgent, plain-spoken, spare, poetic, heart-rending, and heart-mending.
A doctor shares the do-or-die pep talk she gives herself when intubating a young patient.
A nurse contemplates how to act when tending to a woman accused of murder.
A GI fellow serves up an unorthodox "cure" for an ER regular with a proclivity for fajitas.
An intensive care physician recalls the surreal early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A therapist carts a box of police reports, abandoned by a long-ago patient, to yet another new office.
Anger, shame, panic, loneliness, love, hate, wonder, joy: They're all part of a day's work. As the authors of each piece unpack the highs and lows of their vocation, they teach us what it means to empathize deeply, to live fully, and to be human.
About the Author :
Robert M. Hazen, a geoscientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, is the author of Symphony in C, among other titles. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland. Michael L. Wong is a planetary scientist and astrobiologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science. He lives in Washington, DC.
Review :
"Time’s Second Arrow… present[s] an audacious hypothesis: that the increasing complexity observable in the history of life, the universe, and everything reflects a fundamental, hitherto unrecognized law of nature…A laudably concise, compelling account of how everything around us came to be."
