Something for the Pain: Compassion and Burnout in the ER

by Paul Austin

Overview

"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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393337792
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/08/2009
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	852,359
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

09/15/2014
Austin follows up Something for the Pain, his memoir of becoming an ER doctor, with an eloquent account of his experiences raising a child with Down syndrome. It begins in 1987 when he, a third-year resident, and his wife, Sally, a labor and delivery room nurse, receive the news that their newborn daughter, Sarah, has the congenital condition. As Austin watches his wife breast-feed Sarah, and later slips a flower behind his daughter’s ear as she sleeps in his arms, his love for her is unmistakable. He segues seamlessly between scenes of family life and disquisitions on the history and science of Down syndrome, arguing that we are defined by more than our genes. Though Austin doesn’t sugarcoat the challenges he faced, he also shows Sarah as an engaging, sociable child who loved movies, dancing, and drawing. While following her development from birth to age 22, readers also witness Austin’s transformation from a father who once had to “pretend” to be proud, to a man in genuine awe of Sarah’s many gifts. Parents of special-needs kids will find this story particularly inspiring, and its universal message of love and acceptance should speak to a much wider audience. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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