The Blood of Strangers : True Stories from the Emergency Room - Softcover

Huyler, Frank

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1841155497 ISBN 13: 9781841155494

Publisher: Fourth Estate Paperbacks, 2002

Synopsis

A haunting and exquisitely-observed collection of medical vignettes that brilliantly captures the intense drama of the Emergency RoomReminiscent of Chekhovs stories, The Blood of Strangers is a visceral portrayal of a physicians encounters with the highly charged world of an emergency room. In this collection of spare elegant stories, Dr Frank Huyler reveals a side of medicine the intricacy of suturing a facial wound, the bath a patient receives from her husband and daughter interwoven with the lives of the sick and injured. The author presents an array of fascinating characters, both patients and doctors a neurosurgeon who practices witchcraft, a trauma surgeon who unexpectedly commits suicide, a wounded murderer, a man chased across the New Mexico desert by a heat-seaking missile. At times surreal, at times lyrical, at times brutal and terrifying, The Blood of Strangers is a deeply affecting first book from one of the most dramatic specialities of modern medicine.

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Review:

Forget the niceties of plot development and the easy moralizing of the television shows. There's nothing glamorous about a hospital emergency room, that arena where every human flaw and frailty is exposed.

Frank Huyler, a physician and poet, offers a sharp view of life-and-death realities. The emergency room, he writes in these affecting vignettes, is a place where the dominant mood is numbness, where doctors and patients alike have seen too much bloodshed and death. As a defensive reaction, Huyler writes, some doctors become addicted to drugs and other pastimes, while others assume arrogant, cavalier, or aloof airs. This is eminently understandable, and Huyler recounts the growing distance in his relationship with patients as "the earlier intimacy I had felt ... began to recede into the task." A fine storyteller, Huyler doesn't shy away from tales in which he comes up short, just as he shakes his head in bemusement at the ways of administrators and chiefs. In one episode, for instance, he writes of treating a comatose patient with aggressive measures under one attending physician's orders, then doing almost nothing under another's instructions. The patient "was gone from the waking world, as nearly dead as a human being can be, lying at the edge but never quite crossing over"--but, amazingly, he survived both his injuries and the conflict between the two doctors.

Reminiscent of the surgeon-essayist Richard Seltzer's best work, Huyler's memoirs take readers behind the surgical screen. --Gregory McNamee

About the Author:

Frank Huyler is an emergency physician in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His poetry has appeared in various journals and magazines in America. He is 33.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1841155497
• ISBN 13: 9781841155494
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192