“The searing honesty of Something for the Pain makes the heart glad and breaks it at the same time. Austin’s clarity is sobering; his humanity is simply staggering. This chronicle is the unsentimental account of a man who has seen men and women at their worst—and at their best. He has been to the Valley of the Shadow of Death but refused to stay there. Reading Dr. Paul Austin’s riveting story makes me proud to be a human being.”
—Randall Kenan, author of The Fire This Time
“Something for the Pain is remarkable for its compassion, humanity, and scrupulous honesty.”
—Michael Collier, author of Dark Wild Realm
“It turns out there are all kinds of things about working in an ER that most of us haven’t learned from TV or having sat in one. In Something for the Pain, Paul Austin—the ER doc you’d hope to get if something really bad happened—tells us, vividly and with uncommon candor, how, if you aren’t careful, saving people’s lives can make you sick.”
—Ted Conover, author of Newjack
“Courageously peeling away the layers of his life—both professional and personal—Austin tests and finds his limits as a doctor and a father. And when he does, he shows us something universal about how we all break and heal each other and ourselves.”
—Rachel DeWoskin, author of Foreign Babes in Beijing
“Something for the Pain has everything you want in a medical memoir: urgencies, emergencies, life-or-death. And, yes it ‘goes behind the scenes’—so shockingly, at times, that it borders on confession. But the real revelations here are more subtle; Austin, writer as much as physician, can turn the simplest procedure into an occasion for elegy, paean, or profound meditation, phrased with the elegance of a Thoreau. Blood, yes, and pain aplenty—this is a book about the body. But it is also about the spirit, about trauma in all its definitions, about what it costs to heal and be a healer, what it truly means to save a life.”
—David Bradley, author of The Chaneysville Incident
“An intensely personal and truthful account of life as an emergency physician. Great reading for all who work in an acute care environment. If you are considering a career in emergency medicine, you must read this book.”
—Eugenia Quackenbush, MD, FACP, Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine, UNC School of Medicine
“Austin gives a stunning account of the chaos of the emergency room, the constant drama of urgent situations calling for immediate and decisive action. He pulls us inside the chronic exhaustion ER docs fight against and fully engages us in the difficult juggling doctors do.”
—Boston Sunday Globe
“Buy this book! I simply could not put the book down. These are not Hollywood rewritten vignettes…. This is real-life emergency medicine…. Buy it, read it, share it, and enjoy!”
—Academic Emergency Medicine