About 10 years ago, I read a fascinating book by a couple of doctors called “The Medicine of ‘ER.’” With the popularity of NBC’s show about a Chicago emergency room, they decided to look at what happened in fiction and relate it to the reality of emergency medicine.
If I remember correctly, they weren’t too kind, pointing our how Dr. John Carter (Noah Wylie) had the longest ER rotation of any intern ever. They also noticed that Carter never studied or went to the library, something common for a medical trainee. They didn’t come down too harshly on the producers, nothing that the real life of medical interns and residents would not produce gripping TV.
Fast forward to the present and my interest in ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy.” I always notice how often they show the residents at Seattle Grace with their noses in books and medical journals, but the producers take liberties with a lot of other things. I don’t think anyone has dissected Grey’s in print so I found another book to satisfy my curiosity.
“Hot Lights, Cold Steel” follows Dr. Michael Collins during his four-year orthopaedic residency at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Subtitled “Life, Death and Sleepless Nights in a Surgeon’s First Years,” the book really does cover just about everything that happens as a young surgeon learns his trade under constant pressure.
Some of that pressure comes from demanding mentors, some comes from the long hours and low pay and some comes from the desire to keep you and your fellow residents afloat. Collins pulls few punches about the rigors of his education and manages to throw in more than a few funny stories about the emergency room moonlighting he did to make ends meet and advance his overall knowledge.
I honestly had trouble putting the book down. I wanted more every time I came to the end of a chapter. As I started into the stories on his fourth and final year as a resident, I felt a bit of disappointment. Not because the stories dried up. I just didn’t want the book to end.
I did have one problem with the book. Collins talks a lot about how even at a prestigious hospital like the Mayo Clinic, residents have to do mindless and tedious tasks, work incredibly long hours and basically go through a hazing process just because that’s the way their superiors had to endure their residency.
A lot has changed since he was a resident – the book never clearly states when, but it seems like the early to mid-1990s because of his his remarkable procreative history (he and his wife now have 12 children and three of them were born before or during his residency). Still, he never really comes out to say what he thinks should happen during a residency. You can kind of piece it together based on a number of statements, but I was looking for a clear, definitive statement on how his experience shaped his opinion on how others should train.
That never came, but I still loved the book. Even if he didn’t seem to get laid at work like the people at Seattle Grace.