Pamela Grim: Just Here Trying To Save A Few Lives: Tales Of Life And Death From The ER

Toward the end of Just Here Trying To Save A Few Lives, Dr. Pamela Grim briefly likens working in an emergency room to lifting a rock in a sunny meadow and looking at the creatures crawling underneath. She leaves her readers to sort through the possible interpretations: Is it a morbid act of self-destructive curiosity or a brave look into an underlying reality that most people timidly avoid? Judging from her firsthand experiences, both readings apply equally. Grim has worked in ERs across America, trying to save teenage junkies with organ failure, would-be suicides, policemen shot down on the beat, and the wounded felons who shot them. She's vaccinated children in Bosnia, processed battered Kosovar refugees in the no-man's land outside the Macedonian border, and treated meningitis and cholera victims in Nigeria, where the dead had to be "cleared away" from the front porch every morning "to make room for the dying." Her crisp, urgent tales from the front grant astonishingly intimate access to war zones both literal and figurative, as she compares her burning frustration over slow, ugly, preventable deaths in corrupt Third World countries to her panicked frustration over sudden, unpredictable deaths in high-tech American urgent-care centers. Grim's stories are gripping, urgent, and shocking, but her straightforward candor makes the most unbelievable situations inescapably real. Just Here Trying To Save A Few Lives avoids the egocentrism of biography by focusing primarily on the patients; it describes Grim's own life and feelings only in a disorganized, scattershot way. Half the chapters are written in second person, eclipsing her perspective entirely. But this is still an intensely personal book, full of rage, exhaustion, self-doubt, and self-recrimination. It also seems to be a catharsis for Grim, whose battle with shell-shock and burnout has clearly been exacerbated by the average person's unwillingness to deal with the violent realities she faces every day. This fascinating book is a peek under the rock for the morbid and the brave alike, but it's also an invitation to give the aptly named Grim a little company and comfort in a starkly frightening world.