Just Here Trying to Save a Few Lives : Tales of Life and Death from the ER

Rating:
Summary: A must read for all you armchair MD's!
Review: After enjoying Dr. Grim's articles in Discover magazine, I couldn't wait to read her debut novel. I was not disappointed. Although graphic and gut wrenching, it's a true page turner. A must read for anyone interested in emergency medicine. This book sheds new light on the real ER and dims my view of the television ER. I look forward to more from Dr. Grim.

Rating:
Summary: A great collection of tales
Review: If you are a doctor, medical student, or someone interested in life in the ER, you will love this book. It's a collection of short episodes that take place in various ERs during various times in the author's life. They are written in the first person, and as far as I know are true stories. They are reminicent of the TV show ER, but go much deeper into the situations. The language is both medical and in regular language at the same time, which is great. It makes you feel like you are a student standing behind Dr. Grim trying to follow along with the procedures. She has led such an interesting life. The book keeps you rivited, and isn't much of a commitment because for the most part because the stories really aren't linked, so you can read one on a Monday night and another the following Saturday afternoon without having to remember details from Monday. It's full of joy and sorrow, and doesn't have any boring spots. I hope she writes more stuff like this.

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Summary: The ninth circle of hell
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Honest, Affecting, Great Read
Review: The world needs more doctors like Pamela Grim, and we need more writers like Pamela Grim. Grim never stands down from the gritty realities of emergency room medicine, and the devastating effects and heartbreaking aspects of the lack of healthcare in the third-world and wartorn countries where she spent time providing medical care through Medicins San Frontiers.

At the same time, there's no egotistical I'm a doctor bravado...you get a sense that Grim is smart, but at times muddling her way through this -- guided by a combination of knowledge, luck, and circumstance -- as most of us would be in similar circumstances.

Well written, fast-paced, this was one of those books I felt compelled to kept going back to, even though I had other things to do, and read in my spare moments over just two days...

I'll never watch ER or any of the medical shows the same way again, nor will I ever take it so lightly when they start yelling "we're gonna have to crack the chest..." after reading Grim's real account.

Grim's a writer with heart and soul and smarts...I hope we hear more from her.

Mary Shomon, Author of "Living Well With Hypothyroidism: What Your Doctor Doesn't Tell You...That You Need to Know"

Rating:
Summary: excellent, realistic book!
Review: This book was depressing in some parts, but it was very realistic. The author is very lucky to be talented in both the fields of medicine and writing; I loved her writing style! I am a high school senior considering a career in medicine; if you are a high school or college student thinking of going into medicine, or a med student, you should read this book. You'll learn a lot about what really goes on inside an ER!

Rating:
Summary: Occasionally interesting but often depressing
Review: 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.