Christine Gleason

Enjoyable to read. The brief chapters are complete in themselves, making this a good choice if you only have a few spare minutesat a time. These are true experiences of a student doctor in a neonatal intensive care unit. She explains the medical abbreviations and terms she uses, so it's no more difficult to understand than the average hospital TV show. Unlike TV, tho, the focus is not on the soap opera of adult relations, but on the life-threatening problems of the infants. As you read about her struggle with the life and death decisions she had to make, you start to wonder how you would handle them. Gleason appears to be a very humane physician--concerned about keeping the parents (often unwed teens, in the teaching hospital she trained in) involved in their babies' needs, and tries to find a balance between being emotionally involved in their lives and keeping enough distance to be able to make good medical decisions. Besides the babies' stories, as you read you notice another theme that comes out-- our barbaric system for training new doctors, requiring lengthy periods of being on call, generally without sleep. Gleason doesn't make an issue out of this, but it is apparant as an underlying thread in this book as she wonders at times whether her fatigue wa a factor affecting the quality of care she could provide. She was an intern about 30 years ago but interns are still overworked and highly stressed by the unchanged system of placing them on call. I'm glad I live in the northwoods where, if there are few doctors, at least I don't have someone fresh out of a a college pre-med program learning to do their first spinal tap on me or my child.… (altro)