Tornado of Life

<b>Stories from the ER: a doctor shows how empathy creativity and imagination are the cornerstones of clinical care.</b><br><br>To be an emergency room doctor is to be a professional listener to stories. Each patient presents a story; finding the heart of that story is the doctor&#146;s most critical task. More technology more tests and more data won&#146;t work if doctors get the story wrong. Empathy creativity and imagination are the cornerstones of clinical care. In <i>Tornado of Life</i> ER physician Jay Baruch offers a series of short powerful and affecting essays that capture the stories of ER patients in all their complexity and messiness.<br>&#160;<br>Patients come to the ER with lives troubled by scales of misfortune that have little to do with disease or injury. ER doctors must be problem-finders before they are problem-solvers. Cheryl for example whose story is a chaos narrative of &#147;and this happened and then that happened and then and then and then and then&#148; tells Baruch she is stuck in a tornado of life.&#148; What will help her and and what will help Mr. K. who seems like a textbook case of post-combat PTSD but turns out not to be? Baruch describes among other things the emergency of loneliness (invoking Chekhov another doctor-writer); his own (frightening) experience as a patient; the patient who demanded a hug; and emergency medicine during COVID-19. These stories often end without closure or solutions. The patients are discharged into the world. But if they&#146;re lucky the doctor has listened to their stories as well as treated them.<br>