Exhausted! That’s how I felt after reading this book. Chaos ruled in book one and when the hilarity continued in book two, I figured book three would be sedate and the shenanigans would be over. Boy, was I wrong! Book three was just as crazy, and I truly have no idea how he managed to fit so much into each day.
Book three tracks Doctor John in his third
year of residency and we follow a conflicted year (After all this time in
medicine he decided he might rather go into acting!) that should be easier as
he has the theory and practise under his belt, but proves to be the opposite as
he blanks in a code blue and continually questions himself about whether his
decisions are correct.
Having done a few crazy long shifts in my
time, I have the utmost respect for doctors and how they can continue to make
such important decisions on a 33-hour shift. Especially in the ER with gunshot
wounds, faces going through glass tables, kids accidentally getting hurt, and
sutures that continually break. Even more so when dealing with patients that
demand to be seen when their “emergency” is nowhere near serious.
What makes this book so relatable is how
the author doesn’t gloss over the good, the bad, or the ugly. Infected abscesses,
rashes, emergency births, kids with objects up their noses, and circumcisions
are all on the table. We empathise with him as he deals with depressed or
addicted patients. We cheer as he tries to get urology patients to admit that
the main reason they came in was for Viagra. And we laugh as he regales us with
stories of things that happened to him while not in the hospital. Here I’ll
hint at manscaping, a rather nasty cut in the nether regions, a bag clip, and a
blood spurt that made Vesuvius look weak.
A few punctuation gremlins crept in this
time, but were not overly obvious enough to stop the flow of reading. The book
is well written, and the style makes it personable, especially as he allows us
into his relationships and we fall in and out of love with him. Thank you,
Doctor John, for the ride!
Thanks to Reedsy Discovery and the author for the opportunity to review the book.
