Book review : So here we are – The 1001 lives of the emergency room

Baptiste Beaulieu knows what he is talking about: he testifies about his daily life as an intern at the hospital in Auch.

This book is in the continuity of his blog, which met a great success.

Summary

From the emergency room on the first floor to the palliative care on the fifth floor, this is the life of a young intern who hates to start his day with a suicide attempt. A terminally ill patient is impatient: her son is stuck in Reykjavik because of an erupting volcano. To give him time to arrive, the apprentice doctor becomes a storyteller.

Feeding on real situations, Baptiste Beaulieu passes the hospital to the scanner. He paints with lightness and humor the authoritarian bosses, the big-hearted nurses, the blundering interns, the consultations that follow one another, the incredible encounters with patients… Through his stories of a crazy sensitivity, touching and funny, he restores all the little theater of human comedy. A block of humanity.

Critique

We find in it all that humanity can reveal of beautiful or detestable. The grandiose rubs shoulders with the sordid, the small injuries become companions of the desperate cases, and tragedy follows without transition to comedy. The patients are sometimes joyful, sometimes desperate, they can be obnoxious, they are often very endearing.

And then there are the hospital staff. Terribly solicited, often misunderstood, constantly on a tightrope that can break at any moment. Under the white coat, behind the professional gesture, there are men and women who fight, who suffer, who console and accompany.

Baptiste Beaulieu does not take sides: better, he explains.

The interns for whom the party looks like an escape, the chiefs, some of whom are admirable, others obnoxious, and then above all there are the patients, with their qualities and their faults, but whom it is above all necessary to understand and to look after and cure when it is possible.

Emergencies are a kaleidoscope of what a human society can reveal, except that here it is a question of life and death, of healing or end of life.

Fortunately, comedy is often around the corner, and the author reports several particularly funny cases that deserve a reward ! The absurd, misunderstandings, jokes and blunders are never far away.

So here it is is not a literary work as such. The style is direct, the short sentences follow each other quickly and the author sometimes slips into his text some codes whose deciphering is not always obvious, but there is so much authenticity and truth in the story that we let ourselves be carried away, and we wait impatiently for the arrival of the next stretcher or the departure of the next ambulance.

And then there is a red thread: the lady of room 7, the firebird woman. It serves as a framework for the book; it is to her that the intern will go to tell his small or big stories, as much to feel alive as to try to keep alive this flame that is going out.

It is obviously necessary to read the book to know the fall of the story..

To sum up, So here it is is not a collection of anecdotes more or less crisp, but an immersion in a tragicomic world from which we do not leave unscathed.

This book is particularly moving, because it is terribly human, and it concerns us or will concern us one day or another. Find this book by clicking here.