Medical Thriller
Date Published: November 7, 2024
For Sam Wyatt, his intern year was going to be the hardest year of his life. Profoundly affected by violence and death - and long before it was called PTSD or burnout - Sam and his fellow interns, Wilson Harrison, Gina Bautista, and Harry Martin must find a way to survive in THE COUNTY.
Doubting their choices, working 90 hours a week, lacking sleep, surviving on a diet of bad food and black coffee, each must learn to work in the understaffed, underfunded, and deteriorating hospital taking care of critically ill patients; for a system demanding they be constantly overworked if they want to become the doctors they promised themselves they would be.
Within this brutal system, Sam finds a mentor in Fish - his senior resident and the only one to tell him the actual rules to survive:
• Everyone will try to kill your patient, except you.
• It's OK to be wrong, but never unsure.
• Rebels are shot at dawn.
Fish should know. He had been through it just a year before. But would any of them make it out unscathed?
Set in the 1970's, this raw portrait of the birth of emergency medicine bears the roots of many of the problems underlying our broken medical system and our system of training doctors. Ones that have only progressively worsened since that time. But...
If you can persevere...
If you really follow Fish's rules...
Maybe you too can survive THE COUNTY.
AFTER THE TWO BOYS DIED side by side, Sam escaped out
the side door into the drizzle of the cold December night. Exhausted, he bent
over, hands on his knees trying to take a few deep breaths. His anger and
frustration had been growing but this night it tightened its choking grip on
him, draining what little breath he still had out of him. He had tried to speak
several times to tell someone he was going out, getting some badly needed air,
but he was so choked by his anger he could no longer get the words out. After
shaking his finger rhythmically four times at the side door he finally just
expelled the word “out” in a guttural exhalation of anguish. He needed space to
breathe, but now more than ever he longed to be free of this place. He pitched himself
down onto the rickety wooden bench outside the side door, banging his head on
the metal bar behind him as he dropped limply into the seat. Bright sparks
floated inside his eyes as his hearing disappeared into a deep monotone tunnel.
He rubbed the back of his head with his hand. It was wet; was it just his
sweat, or worse? He grimaced when he pressed his scalp and felt a lump. He
checked his fingers, no blood at least.
About the Author
In a career that spanned 5 decades in emergency medicine, Dr. Zane Horowitz was there when the specialty began. He worked predominantly in county hospitals and trauma centers throughout his 45-year career. He has seen the best and the worst of healthcare delivery. Since those early days, he has held many roles in the field of emergency medicine. He directed pre-hospital ambulance systems, supervised a multi-county rural EMS system and an air-medical helicopter service, and worked in community and rural critical access emergency departments. Currently, he is a Professor of Emergency Medicine at Oregon Health Science University, and he practices medical toxicology as the Associate Medical Director with the Oregon Poison Center. With over 100 medical publications Zane Horowitz now has written a novel about the early days of emergency medicine called THE COUNTY.
Purchase Link
No comments:
Post a Comment