W. W. Norton & Company, 9/2009
Paul Austin’s book Something for the Pain is the right book for every physician who has ever worked in an emergency room or advised a patient to go to, or through, the ER. This book is also the right book for any nurse, nursing assistant, PA, resident, intern, or staff member of a hospital who has ever worked, or is working in, an emergency room. It is the right book for any EMT or medic who has brought a patient to an emergency room. And, most of all, it is the right book for any person, who, for any reason, has had to go to the emergency room or been there with family or a friend.
Dr. Paul Austin is an emergency room doctor, and he has been working in emergency medicine since he first entered medical school at the age of twenty-seven. His ER experience covers time as a nursing assistant, and as a physician; it covers his time in Durham, NC, Pennsylvania, and back to Durham where he decided to settle after completing his residency. Austin knows of what he speaks in Something for the Pain.
Austin narrates a variety of experiences he has faced while working the ER, only some of which are medically related. He also relates through his personal experiences the stresses, the angers, and the joys of the relatively rarified community of which he is a member. He allows how the ER affects the lives of he and his family, but, also, how his training, his beliefs, and his compassion, affect his work in the ER.
The ER is an ongoing process; it is a growth process; and, it is a learning process. With guts (no pun intended), with humor, with insight, but, mostly with a deep underlying compassion, Austin tells the reader what the ER is really like from the prospective of each actor on the scene. Something for the Pain is a book about understanding, and the reader will come away from the reading experience with the understanding sought. Austin does a good job. -Deal
