Just Here Trying to Save a Few Lives: Tales of Life and Death from the ER [Hardcover]

Pamela Grim (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 2000

An emergency medicine physician for nearly a decade, Dr. Pamela Grim has delivered babies, treated heart attacks, saved car accident victims, comforted the dying, and consoled the living who were left behind. She has worked all over the world, caring for victims of gang life in inner cities, victims of the war in Bosnia, poverty-stricken patients in Nigeria, and bank presidents in the United States. Relating these rich and varied experiences with compelling prose, Dr. Grim takes readers into the E.R. and lets them experience first-hand what it takes to make split-second, life-and-death decisions in the course of an average day. And with unflinching honesty, she conveys what its like to be a caring physician with one of the most demanding, exhilarating, frustrating, and rewarding jobs in the world. With an audience of 30 million, NBCs ER demonstrates how popular medical dramas are. That same audience will embrace this well-written collection of real-life tales from the Emergency Room. Medical nonfiction is a bestselling niche, as evidenced by Oliver Sacks An Anthropologist on Mars (Vintage, 1996) and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (Touchstone, 4/98), and the works of Perri Klass. In addition to writing for the medical community, Dr. Pamela Grim has written articles about her experiences in the E.R. that Discover magazine published in its Vital Signs column.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In this outstanding collection of stories and "lessons," Pamela Grim, an emergency medicine physician, reveals the painful truths learned from the daily witnessing of the underside of life, where most who enter are addicts, idiots, drunks, and psychotics whose poor choices have led them to the end of the line. The ER is a more tragic, chaotic, and weird place than any TV show has ever portrayed. A man walks in with a butcher knife imbedded in his skull, a teenage girl asks incredulously, "I'm pregnant?" after delivery, and the best kind of cop dies on the table while his killer is saved in the next room. Grim brilliantly captures the adrenaline-fueled chaos of code calls in inner-city ERs, where the unrelenting pressure puts doctors and nurses alike in a perpetual state of shell shock. In this environment, doctors must make split-second decisions under the specter of malpractice suits and the knowledge that every moment weighs in on whether the patient will live or die. Fortunately, Grim is the sort of storyteller who can make a reader cry then laugh out loud in a matter of pages. She is a no-nonsense doctor--and author--whose compassion and wisdom are as unexpected and brightly illuminated as the resurrection of the 4-year-old with no pulse who was crushed by the family car.

Between the pressure and the bruises left by each death, burnout is inevitable. Grim's response is to head for Nigeria with Doctors Without Borders, and later to Bosnia and a Kosovar refugee camp, where once again she is "awestruck by the suffering God can inflict." The dearth of technology and supplies and the low survival rates make a shocking contrast to the miracles achieved in American hospitals. Grim considers some profound issues--the nature of grief, the humanitarian aid paradox in which helping out can indirectly enable corrupt governments, and the despair of trying to save lives when so many are dying. Ultimately, she realizes that the answer is in the particular; it is saving individual lives that makes her work--and life itself--meaningful. This is one powerful page-turner with the potential to change minds as well as lives. --Lesley Reed

From Publishers Weekly

An ER doctor who has spent time in Nigeria and Macedonia with Doctors Without Borders, Grim isn't just a committed physicianAshe's a kind of philosopher of life and death. In her first book, she tracks how it feels to repeatedly witness sickness and death. She tells tales about the alarmingly high mortality rates she encountered in Africa during a meningitis epidemic; the premature, barely breathing and crack-addicted babies she's delivered; the victims of automobile accidents and child abuse and street violence she's treated in the ER. In terse, understated language, Grim explains what motivated her to do this work (her mother was an alcoholic) and how she got burnt out (which ironically led to her decision to go abroad, where she'd imagined the pace would be slower). Along the way, she conveys both the day-to-day experience of doctoring and the broader difficulties of providing medical services in countries where poverty means basic medical supplies are not available. "I know how it is to be angry," she writes. "All the other emotions just get in the way of being a doctor." Therein lies her strength but also her weakness: she makes clear the development of her defense mechanisms; the more she witnesses brutality, the more she retreats from the grief that overwhelms her when a patient dies. One of these defense mechanisms is an impatient cynicism (regarding drug addicts, for instance); while this clearly has made her heroic efforts as a doctor possible, it doesn't serve her well as an author. At times a sharply brittle tone intrudes on this otherwise moving account of the medical profession's dark side. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 306 pages
• Publisher: Warner Books (July 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0446524239
• ISBN-13: 978-0446524230
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #918,805 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The ninth circle of hell, October 10, 2003

By 

E. A. Lovitt "starmoth" (Gladwin, MI USA) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Just Here Trying to Save a Few Lives: Tales of Life and Death from the ER (Paperback)

The ninth circle of hell in this autobiography of emergency room physician Pamela Grim is the South Side of Chicago. When she burns out trying to heal the unceasing stream of addicts, assault victims, and alcoholics who flood into her emergency room, she joins Médecins sans Frontières and descends even further into what might be the modern tenth and eleventh circles of hell: Bosnia in the depths of war and genocide; and Africa during a meningitis epidemic.

Grim, indeed. This is not a book to read if you're already feeling depressed. I thought I wouldn't have a problem with this story because I'd been watching that interesting and horrifying bit of reality T.V. called, "Trauma: Life in the E.R." Now I realize that even though 'Trauma' viewers see everything from surgeons rooting around in a gunshot victim's intestines to ER physicians trying to save an eyeball that has popped out of an accident victim's head, reality T.V. doesn't come close to Dr. Grim's reality.

Some of her saddest cases, in Chicago at least, involve babies born to cocaine-addicted, alcoholic mothers who don't come into contact with a physician until they're giving birth. Babies in America aren't usually born in an emergency room--except when Dr. Grim happens to be moonlighting in a hospital that doesn't have an obstetrician on site, or when the mother is wheeled into ER with two bullets through her brain. In one of the most gruesome episodes in this book, she assists in the birth of an anencephalic baby: "There was a rivulet of fluid, and then this 'thing' slithered out onto the cart..."

Never mind. At least the babies in Chicago don't die of tetanus like they still do in Africa. In her preface to the chapter, "How to Treat Tetanus," Dr. Grim quotes from the Qu' aran:

Also a sign for them is that we bear their progeny on the laden ship. / If we will, we drown them, / and there is no helper for them/ nor are they saved, unless as a mercy from us...

There is very little mercy in this chapter about a Nigerian police officer who dies of a treatable, preventable disease that Dr. Grim never experienced in all of her years in Chicago. She does what she can for the man, scrounging medicine from her meningitis cases, taping "TOUCH THIS IV AND YOU DIE" to the man's IV, even transporting him from the Médecins sans Frontières field clinic to a 'tetanus hospital' ten miles away. The so-called 'hospital' had no medicine, no beds, not even a dark, quiet place for him to die. Some of the author's most poignant musings occur while she is travelling with the dying man. She thinks about the equipment, techniques, and medicine that would have been able to treat this man in America--even on the South Side of Chicago.

This is a profoundly moving book.

17 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Occasionally interesting but often depressing, October 14, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Just Here Trying to Save a Few Lives: Tales of Life and Death from the ER (Hardcover)

While the middle third of this book is interesting, the rest of it is rather dull and depressing. That's not surprising since the author's pilgrimage was precipitated by her melancholy and disappointment with life as an ER physician in America. As an ER doctor, I can certainly sympathize with her discontent, but I am nevertheless shocked that such a glum book was published. Although it is true that any accurate portrayal of ER medicine is bound to include much negativity, Dr. Grim (how utterly apropos, by the way) could have tempered her pervasively gloomy account with an occasional ray of sunshine.

In addition to making readers reach for their Prozac, there's a lot about this book that I didn't like. First, the quality of writing was annoying. Second, I repeatedly had the feeling that her smattering of interesting stories were overly embellished and hence not entirely believable. Third, Dr. Grim leaves readers wondering if she's still working in the ER or is now doing hair transplants. The central question in this book is whether Grim can shake her disaffection with ER medicine and keep working in that field, or whether she decides to accept a job offer from a friend to perform hair transplants and other cosmetic procedures. Fourth, this book is by no means a complete or even passably complete narrative of what it is like to be an ER physician.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must read for all you armchair MD's!, August 21, 2000

By 

Diana Dashner "Conan the Librarian" (Oswego, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Just Here Trying to Save a Few Lives: Tales of Life and Death from the ER (Hardcover)

After enjoying Dr. Grim's articles in Discover magazine, I couldn't wait to read her debut novel. I was not disappointed. Although graphic and gut wrenching, it's a true page turner. A must read for anyone interested in emergency medicine. This book sheds new light on the real ER and dims my view of the television ER. I look forward to more from Dr. Grim.