Showing titles in Emergency & Critical Care

The Buddhist approach to death can be of great benefit to people of all backgrounds - as has been demonstrated time and again in Joan Halifax's decades of work with the dying and their caregivers. Inspired by traditional Buddhist teachings, her work is a source of wisdom for all those who are charged with a dying person's care, facing their own death, or wishing to explore and contemplate the transformative power of the dying process.

How can we maintain optimal levels of pressure so we perform at our best? What systems and tools can we use to own the pressure? What techniques can we apply to regain composure and situational control when under pressure? All of us experience moments when we are under pressure and need to perform to a high standard. While the right level of pressure enhances our performance, excessive pressure leads to cognitive overload, stress, and compromises our ability to perform. How can we own the pressure to achieve peak performance?

What is it really like to be a firefighter? How does it feel to respond to an emergency call, to know that someone's life hangs in the balance and every second is critical? What is it like to fight a fire, to battle through the heat and the smoke, to put your own life in danger to save others? How does it feel to rescue survivors, and what is it like to recover the bodies of those who you didn’t reach in time?

In every hospital emergency department there is a room reserved for trauma. It is a place where life and death are separated by the thinnest of margins. A place where some families celebrate the most improbable of victories while others face the most devastating of losses. A place where what matters the most in this life is revealed. Trauma Room Two is just such a place. In this collection of short stories, Dr. Green takes the listener inside the hidden emotional landscape of emergency medicine.

For fifteen years, Joanna Sokol filled private notebooks with her confusion, humor, and anger about the strange world of American street medicine. As her career progressed, she found herself taking notes on scraps of paper, backs of gloves, and margins of EKG printouts. She read about the history that brought ambulances into their current role as the caretakers of society’s forgotten, and spoke to her colleagues about their own experiences and perspectives. Those reflections are collected here, in a series of raw, powerful essays about the state of American medicine.

In the current climate of increasing prehospital demand, it is more important than ever for paramedics to demonstrate optimum skill, safety, and professionalism. With growing call volume, public scrutiny, legal liability, and employer expectation often creating a sense of overwhelm, the ability to maintain these standards can begin to suffer. Find out how to evaluate your everyday practice using a simple, pain scale type approach. Remain at the top of your game, no matter where you’re at in your career.

This book is written by America's top medical preparedness experts: Joe Alton, MD, and Amy Alton, ARNP. Their mission: to put a medically prepared person in every family for when medical help is not on the way. Using decades of medical experience, they address, in plain language, dozens of medical issues associated with surviving disasters and epidemics. The Altons also discuss the medical supplies needed to become a medical asset to your family and community as well as alternative and natural strategies for when pharmaceuticals aren't available.

On January 12, 2010, a major earthquake struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Hundreds of thousands of people died, and the greater part of the capital was demolished. Dr. Paul Farmer, U.N. deputy special envoy to Haiti, who had worked in the country for nearly thirty years treating infectious diseases like tuberculosis and AIDS, and former President Bill Clinton, the U.N. special envoy to Haiti, had just begun to work on an extensive development plan to improve living conditions in Haiti.

Having worked in the emergency services for more than 15 years, Dan Farnworth has seen it all. There was the time he was called to take away a dead body - only for the 'corpse' to jolt back into life and demand to know what he was doing in her house. Earlier in his career, he unwittingly disturbed a crime scene as he shared the sad news of the victim's death with her son.

Following up on his well-received first book, Andy Thompson provides another captivating, thought-provoking, and at times intense glimpse into the daily life of a paramedic working in the UK's National Health Service. In the style of his first book, Andy recalls each event from the detailed documentation recorded at the time. Each account is written in a way that puts the listener right there next to him, so you live the events in real time.

Michele Harper is a female African-American emergency room physician in a profession that is overwhelmingly male and white. Brought up in Washington, DC, in a complicated family, she went to Harvard, where she met her husband. They stayed together through medical school until two months before she was scheduled to join the staff of a hospital in central Philadelphia, when he told her he couldn't move with her. Her marriage at an end, Harper began her new life in a new city, in a new job, as a newly single woman.

In Miracles and Mayhem in the ER, Dr. Brent Russell shares true-life stories of his early days as an emergency room doctor. Contemplative and oftentimes hilarious, Dr. Russell leads the listener through the glass doors and down the narrow halls of the ER where desperate patients, young and old, come to get well. Occasionally heart wrenching and always fast-paced, Miracles and Mayhem in the ER will have listeners holding their breath one second and celebrating the next.

Share the innermost feelings of emergency services workers as they encounter trauma, tragedy, redemption, and even a little humor. This audiobook details a progression from innocence to enlightened caregiver to burnout, glimpsing into each stage personally and professionally.

Recalling remarkable cases - and people - from a career launched in the first days of Emergency Medicine, Dr. Paul Seward leads us in his memoir through suspenseful diagnoses and explorations of anatomy. Within the conditions of great stress and rapid decision-making that are routine in the ER, Dr. Seward tells us that medical staff must be more than technicians of the body: They must be restorers of the human.

As an emergency room doctor working on the rapid evaluation unit, Dr. Thomas Fisher has about three minutes to spend with the patients who come into the South Side of Chicago ward where he works before directing them to the next stage of their care. Bleeding: three minutes. Untreated wound that becomes life-threatening: three minutes. Kidney failure: three minutes. He examines his patients inside and out, touches their bodies, comforts and consoles them, and holds their hands on what is often the worst day of their lives.

Jessica Zitter became a doctor because she wanted to be a hero. She elected to specialize in critical care - to become an ICU physician - and imagined herself swooping in to rescue patients from the brink of death. But then during her first code she found herself cracking the ribs of a patient so old and frail it was unimaginable he would ever come back to life. She began to question her choice. Extreme Measures charts Zitter's journey from wanting to be one kind of hero to becoming another - a doctor who prioritizes the patient's values and preferences.

Andy Thompson's true-to-life, graphic, and gripping account of his work as an NHS paramedic in Britain's Accident and Emergency Ambulance Service will shock you, sadden you, entertain you, and perhaps inspire you. You'll smile at some of Andy's real patient encounters, while others will cause you to wipe a tear.

Welcome to a small-town Emergency Room in rural Ohio. While it's true our ER doesn't see the stabbing and gunshot action ERs see in inner cities, we have no shortage of the sad, the scary, the painful, and the just plain dumb. With more than 20 stories, things ER workers want to say to patients, and Emergency Room bingo, A Double Dose of Dilaudid will take you on a joyride to the funnier side of the ER. See what a bored husband did to get out of a date night with his wife, find out what happens when you try to make your own meth, and more.

Standing in the trauma room of an emergency department is like standing at ground zero of a nuclear reaction, only it's not radiation that is released - but stories. Stories that are told and retold, sometimes just until the end of the shift, but sometimes for decades.

Going well beyond first aid, this manual describes medical secrets used by an experienced African mission doctor and former assistant professor of emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School. The tips are pragmatic, affordable, and useful for anyone from medics to laypersons but are particularly aimed at people who work and live in remote areas with scarce resources. The subjects cover antibiotic therapy, advanced care of complex wounds, laceration closure with glue, malaria, oral rehydration therapy, fecal transplantation, and more.