Description

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"A stunning account of the chaos of the emergency room." —Boston Globe

In this eye-opening account of life in the ER, Paul Austin recalls how the daily grind of long, erratic shifts and endless hordes of patients with sad stories sent him down a path of bitterness and cynicism. Gritty, powerful, and ultimately redemptive, Something for the Pain is a revealing glimpse into the fragility of compassion and sanity in the industrial setting of today’s hospitals.

About the Author

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Paul Austin, an emergency-room doctor, is the author of two memoirs: Something for the Pain and Beautiful Eyes. His essays have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, the Southeast Review, and the Gettysburg Review. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Praise For…

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It turns out there are all kinds of things about working in an ER that most of us haven’t learned from TV or having sat in one. In Something for the Pain, Paul Austin—the ER doc you’d hope to get if something really bad happened—tells us, vividly and with uncommon candor, how, if you aren’t careful, saving people’s lives can make you sick.

— Ted Conover, author of Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing

The searing honesty of Something for the Pain makes the heart glad and breaks it at the same time. Austin’s clarity is sobering; his humanity is simply staggering. This chronicle is the unsentimental account of a man who has seen men and women at their worst—and at their best. He has been to the Valley of the Shadow of Death but refused to stay there. Reading Dr. Paul Austin’s riveting story makes me proud to be a human being.

— Randall Kenan, author of The Fire This Time

In these fast-paced and extremely dramatic vignettes, Paul Austin puts us in the middle of the harrowing work that emergency room doctors and nurses face around the clock…Something for the Pain is remarkable for its compassion, humanity, and scrupulous honesty.

— Michael Collier, author of Dark Wild Realm

Moving, troubling, and revelatory, Something for the Pain offers intimate glimpses of the behind-the-scenes human costs of one man’s work in the ER. With his honesty, need, frustration, and humanity, Austin is a narrator you can trust, and he tells a story of disturbing power.

— Joy Castro, author of The Truth Book

Something for the Pain has everything you want in a medical memoir: urgencies, emergencies, life-or-death. Austin, writer as much as physician, can turn the simplest procedure into an occasion for elegy, paean, or profound meditation, phrased with the elegance of a Thoreau. Blood, yes, and pain aplenty—this is a book about the body. But it is also about the spirit, about trauma in all its definitions, about what it costs to heal and be a healer, what it truly means to save a life.

— David Bradley, author of The Chaneysville Incident

Buy this book! I simply could not put the book down. These are not Hollywood rewritten vignettes…This is real-life emergency medicine…Buy it, read it, share it, and enjoy!
— Academic Emergency Medicine

This vivid memoir of an ER doctor will make readers by turns cry and cringe. A definite page-turner and a riveting debut.
— Library Journal (starred review)

[A] relentlessly honest look at modern emergency medicine…What makes this inspiring medical memoir stand out is the courageous measure of Austin’s humanity.
— Publishers Weekly

Austin examines the diametrically opposed perils of cynical detachment and overemotional involvement, pondering the question of just how empathic a clinician can be and still be competent. An ER physician gives serious thought to what he does, how he does it and what it does cost him.
— Kirkus Reviews