Overview

A haunting and exquisitely-observed collection of medical vignettes that brilliantly captures the intense drama of the Emergency Room Reminiscent of Chekhov’s stories, The Blood of Strangers is a visceral portrayal of a physician’s encounters with the highly charged world of an emergency room. In this collection of spare elegant stories, Dr Frank Huyler reveals a side of medicine – the intricacy of suturing a facial wound, the bath a patient receives from her husband and daughter – interwoven with the lives of the sick and injured. The author presents an array of fascinating characters, both patients and doctors – a neurosurgeon who practices witchcraft, a trauma surgeon who unexpectedly commits suicide, a wounded murderer, a man chased across the New Mexico desert by a heat-seaking missile. At times surreal, at times lyrical, at times brutal and terrifying, The Blood of Strangers is a deeply affecting first book from one of the most dramatic specialities of modern medicine.

Full Product Details

9781841155494

Table of Contents

Reviews

'Unforgettable.' Sunday Times 'Set to become a classic.' Independent 'A breathtakingly brilliant portrait, sketched so elegantly that if it were done in pencil it would only consist of a few sharp lines.' The Times 'One of the best writers to emerge since the death of Raymond Carver. He moves medicine out of the realm of science and into the domain of humanity.' Red / 'Dr Huyler's short, intense book treats of only the most important matters: life and death. This is a young writer with a big mind -- and an even bigger heart.' Paul Auster / 'If Raymond Carver had been a doctor, these are the stories he would have written. There are no untarnished heroes here. This is the world as it is: lovely and disturbing all at once.' Atul Gawande, New Yorker

Meditations on the human condition: an unusual series of quiet, concentrated stories from an emergency-room physician. Huyler is a published poet and surgeon in Albuquerque, N.M., and he doesn't have to shout to get his message across. Dramatic, desperate, baffling events abound, and Huyler easily draws us into the picture: a man transferred from prison, in a coma for weeks, with Huyler about to withdraw life support - watched by guards, family, and hospital staff. He always looked the same, covered with tattoos, his arms pockmarked by years of shooting heroin and cocaine, his eyes half open to the ceiling, kept alive by the ventilator. . . . He was in for murder. Forty-five years old, with an abscess in his heart from shooting contaminated blood into his veins, it had finally come to this: my shift, my night on call, my job to turn him off. There are some intriguing oddities here: Huyler's medical-school anatomy-lab partner is arrested for murdering his lover; a catastrophically injured rodeo rider in the intensive-care unit completely recovers in spite of being treated on alternate days with either benign neglect or medical full-court press, depending on which of two attending physicians is on call. Throughout, Huyler's basic respect and admiration for others shows; he likes patients who are brave in the face of disaster - old women facing dire surgery who say they understand, who smile and pat my hand and tell me to send their children in. I like the men who flirt with the nurses even though the EKG is unmistakable. And in the end, Huyler sums up the only lesson: Odds whisper around us, wheels turn, molecules whir like bobbins. And then, maybe once or twice in our whole lives, events conspire, statistics align with the force of diamonds, against us, and they knock us out, there is no chance, the wind blows through us, we're gone. Utterly engrossing, moving, poetic accounts. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Frank Huyler is an emergency physician in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His poetry has appeared in various journals and magazines in America. He is 33.

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