Meditations on the human condition: an unusual series of quiet,
concentrated stories from an emergency-room physician. Huyler is a
published poet and surgeon in Albuquerque, N.M., and he doesn't
have to shout to get his message across. Dramatic, desperate,
baffling events abound, and Huyler easily draws us into the
picture: a man transferred from prison, in a coma for weeks, with
Huyler about to withdraw life support - watched by guards, family,
and hospital staff. "He always looked the same, covered with
tattoos, his arms pockmarked by years of shooting heroin and
cocaine, his eyes half open to the ceiling, kept alive by the
ventilator. . . . He was in for murder. Forty-five years old, with
an abscess in his heart from shooting contaminated blood into his
veins, it had finally come to this: my shift, my night on call, my
job to turn him off." There are some intriguing oddities here:
Huyler's medical-school anatomy-lab partner is arrested for
murdering his lover; a catastrophically injured rodeo rider in the
intensive-care unit completely recovers in spite of being treated
on alternate days with either benign neglect or medical full-court
press, depending on which of two attending physicians is on call.
Throughout, Huyler's basic respect and admiration for others shows;
he likes patients who are brave in the face of disaster - old women
facing dire surgery who say they understand, "who smile and pat my
hand and tell me to send their children in. I like the men who
flirt with the nurses even though the EKG is unmistakable." And in
the end, Huyler sums up the only lesson: "Odds whisper around us,
wheels turn, molecules whir like bobbins. And then, maybe once or
twice in our whole lives, events conspire, statistics align with
the force of diamonds, against us, and they knock us out, there is
no chance, the wind blows through us, we're gone." Utterly
engrossing, moving, poetic accounts. (Kirkus Reviews)
A haunting and exquisitely-observed collection of medical vignettes
that brilliantly captures the intense drama of the Emergency Room
Reminiscent of Chekhov's stories, The Blood of Strangers is a
visceral portrayal of a physician's 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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