Overview

Michelle Au started medical school armed only with a surfeit of idealism, a handful of old 'ER' episodes to reference, and some vague notion about 'helping people'. This is the story of how she grew up and became a real doctor. Through her years in medical training, she also attempts to maintain a life outside the hospital as she and her resident husband decide to have a baby. A new mother struggling to balance long days and nights in the hospital with her 'real' life, Au finds herself in the classic struggle of working motherhood, trying to do two equally high-stress jobs without losing her sanity or sense of humour. THIS WON'T HURT A BIT is a story about the imperfect, occasionally ridiculous, never boring process of medical training and life outside it, where an ordinary person can learn the kind of doctor and mother she wants to be under the most extraordinary circumstances.

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9780446538244

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Reviews

In this treasure of a medical memoir, Au makes doctors seem fallible and funny. She opens her book with her attempt, as a third-year medical student, to retrieve a stool sample from a 300-plus-pound 85-year-old. After she finally gets the specimen, she accidentally leaves the card with its hard-won brown smears on the table next to an empty bagel tray. After some epiphanies ( I hate working in the pediatric emergency room ), she switches from pediatrics to anesthesiology. Meanwhile, her boyfriend (now husband), Joe, picks ophthalmology, seemingly a good-hours specialty, but one that actually requires being on call every night for two years. After a colleague says he is sure she'll find a mommy job, she does land a manageable-hour position. Au seems to strike a good balance between being a good mom, wife, and doctor, and stays humble in the process. In fact, she talks frankly about the fear doctors can and should feel: If you don't admit to being scared sometimes, you're an asshol

As anyone who reads her blog knows, Michelle Au is a gifted writer. This Won't Hurt a Bit is an honest account of how Dr. Au balances physician training with the demands of family life. Her witty observations of our health care system are interspersed with stories that can either break your heart or make you laugh. They are always poignant, and give both physicians and patients a fresh, insightful look at how medicine is practiced today. --Kevin Pho, MD, creator of KevinMD.com

Honest, irreverent . . .hilarious and heart-breaking . . . this memoir is not just about how [Dr. Au] navigated the medical world. It's about the life she wanted beyond the four walls of the hospital. --StudentDoc.com

An account of medicine, marriage and motherhood, executed with style and enough humor to offset the not-always-happy endings for patients. <br>Make no mistake: For all you hear about humanizing the process, giving residents more sleep time and so on, medical training has not changed much. Medicine remains a craft built on a strict hierarchy. Med school begins with two years of class work followed by two years of rotations as interns in a hospital's clinics. Then comes residency for several years to learn a specialty and maybe more time on a fellowship, until you finally graduate and can call the shots. Attending physician of anesthesiology Au, who began writing humor while an undergraduate at Wellesley, plunges in on page one describing her experience as a fledgling intern asked to reach into the rectum of an obese, demented man to get a stool sample for occult blood testing. After this episode, she backtracks to discuss the whys of choosing medicine and then proceeds chronologicall

Every five minutes or so I laughed out loud . . . This was one of the funniest books I have read in a long time and it was so poignant . . . PICK THIS BOOK UP. --Heaven is a Bookstore

Author Information

Michelle Au received her M.D. from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 2003 and completed her residency in anesthesiology at the Columbia University Medical Center in Manhattan. She is married to Dr. Joseph Walrath, has two sons and is an anesthesiologist in a private practice

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