Whatever your job is, you might be glad you don’t work the emergency room after reading Mark Brown’s Emergency!: True Stories from the Nation’s ERs.

Brown collected anecdotes from a few dozen stethoscope warriors. (This book is twenty-five years old.) The readers gets to peek into this horror- and humor-filled world, where the patients arrive beaten, tossed, unresponsive, panicked, maybe in the arms of loved ones.

There are the whacked-out patients, who mark the staff’s shift with mayhem and possibly a great deal of urine.

There are the embarrassed patients, who stick things in orifices and can’t get them out. They might cross state lines to avoid meeting anyone they know in their home hospital.

There are the leading-a-double-life patients, whose possessions spill out secrets that the staff must keep to themselves as they greet the arriving relatives.

And there are the soon-to-be-dead patients who, when they come to, look the doctors straight in the eye, giving the crew the juice to keep up those chest compressions another forty-five minutes.

So, maybe you don’t want to work there (or maybe you do?), but it’s a good bet that you would love to visit this world in the pages of Brown’s book.

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