True Emergency Room Stories, Books, Book Reviews, ER Questions and Answers from ER Doctor Kevin Pezzi

Welcome to the ERbook.net: the Web's foremost site for unusual true Emergency Room stories and discussions about the specialty of emergency medicine.

Interested in the television show ER or real emergency rooms? Intrigued by unusual emergency room stories? Want to know what it's really like to be an ER doctor? Are you thinking of becoming an emergency doctor or nurse? Ever wonder what goes on in hospital emergency rooms that is never mentioned on the show ER? Do you enjoy reading books of ER stories? Do you have a question that you'd like to ask an ER doctor? Do you want some advice for getting into medical school or tips for the MCAT exam? Even if you don't think you're smart enough to become a doctor, I can show you how to transform your brain into the mind of a genius. So if you're interested in ER topics or medicine in general, you'll spend many enjoyable and informative hours reading the numerous pages on my web site.

In this site I'll present some excerpts and reviews of ER books, answer questions that I'm often asked during my radio interviews, and present a wide-ranging ER question & answer (Q&A) forum along with a variety of other ER topics. I am willing to answer questions pertaining to emergency medicine, medicine in general, sex, brainpower, and scholastic achievement, but before you contact me, please check my numerous Q&A pages to see if I've already covered that topic (I probably have!).

If you're interested in medicine in general and ER in particular, you might want to read my book reviews even if reviews aren't normally your cup of tea, because in some of my many tangents I address a few of the thorniest issues in medicine today. I also tell some stories I didn't include in my first ER book, and in a humorous (I think) graphic I poke fun at an uppity Harvard grad who knows less than what she thinks she does.

If you are one of the many students who come to this site seeking career advice, you may wonder about my qualifications for giving it. I covered this topic in the following excerpt from the introduction to my book:

So You Want to be an ER Doctor?
The Pros and Cons of a Career in Emergency Medicine
Tips on Achieving Your Goal

While any ER doctor could plausibly write a book such as this one, I believe that I am more qualified for two reasons. First, I had to overcome a number of obstacles to achieve success. Many medical students come from professional, stable families in which the children are showered with a number of material advantages. You may not be so fortunate, but this need not hamper you. Even if you are poor, as I was, I can show you how to outperform your peers who attended the best private schools, were well connected, and could afford every conceivable boost such as prep courses for the SAT exam. Second, I wasn’t born bright. In sixth grade, my teacher chided me for being “slow,” and I received D’s in my sophomore year of high school. It’s not an understatement to say that I was considerably behind the curve for people with aspirations of a medical career. In spite of that inauspicious beginning, I obtained virtually perfect grades my last two years of high school and throughout college, and I aced the MCAT exam. My medical school accepted one person per year (for a class of 256 students) with just three years of college if their grades and MCAT scores were exemplary, and I was that person. Like many medical school applicants, I felt some anticipatory anxiety over the admissions interview, which is fabled to be stressful. Instead of grilling me with tough questions, my interviewer examined my record, then looked at me and said, “We’re obviously going to accept you.” I graduated in the top 1% of my class in medical school, and was such a shoo-in for an ER residency position (the most coveted residency at that time) that I was offered an under-the-table deal because they wanted to ensure that no other hospital lured me away. The director of my residency program once commented that I was the smartest resident they ever had, and one of my former bosses told me that I was the smartest doctor he ever met. Aren't these implausible accolades for someone who was once a class dunce? Hence, I think that I am uniquely qualified to write a “how to succeed” book, because I know how to do it, and I was not born with that aptitude. I learned how to expand my brainpower, and I can show you how to do the same thing. You can learn more from me than you can from people who were born on third base, and act as if they just hit a triple. Whether they are born geniuses telling you how to become more intelligent, or people with naturally beautiful bodies lecturing you on how to be more attractive, I question the utility of their advice.

Besides giving you tips on ways to augment your intelligence and memory, I will tell you a secret that will give you an edge over other medical school applicants. A minority of them have stellar grades and MCAT scores. The record of most successful applicants is very good, but not superb. How can you convince the Admissions Committee that they should pick you, instead of another qualified applicant? Given the limited number of available positions, Admissions Committees cannot accept everyone who is smart enough to become a doctor. Most applicants seek to enhance their desirability by doing things that really don’t give them an edge, such as volunteering. Amongst medical school applicants, this is almost as common as breathing, so it is futile to think that this will make you stand out from the crowd. Unless you are content with entrusting your future to fate, or subsequently reapplying if you are rejected, you need something that gives you a distinct advantage. I will tell you how to do something that will leave an indelibly positive impression on the Admissions Committee, and all but ensure that you will be accepted.

In this book, I will also discuss the pros and cons of a career in emergency medicine (and, to a lesser extent, to any medical career). Unlike some authors who gloss over the drawbacks of a career so they can write a more rah-rah book and achieve more sales, I will emphasize the negative aspects to balance the overly positive impression you probably possess from various media exposures. There are several factors that conspire to make emergency medicine a noxious career, but I will reveal how you can minimize some of these headaches.

You will be pleasantly surprised if you’re expecting a dry, pedantic book. You will find many intriguing, provocative, and offbeat discussions that will increase your knowledge of what it’s really like to be an ER doctor. I will also talk about how an ER career affects your personal life. Believe me, it will.

Unlike some authors who hide behind their publishers and don’t make themselves available to their readers, I am very accessible. You can contact me by using this hyperlink: www.MySpamSponge.com/send.php?handle=erdoc (see * below). If you have a question that I did not address in this book, I will gladly answer it for you and include it in a subsequent book so that others can benefit from the information.

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* MySpamSponge is a site I developed that anyone can use to block all of their spam, but never any legitimate messages. With MySpamSponge, you communicate using handles instead of e-mail addresses. A handle is essentially a contact code that gives people a way to contact you via e-mail without you having to reveal your e-mail address. Similarly, you can send a message by using the recipient’s handle as the address (mine is ERdoc). Smart people will quickly "get it" and realize that this could be the magic bullet that makes spam a thing of the past, but I wonder if the average Internet user can grasp a major innovation that didn't come from Microsoft or Google. We'll see.

By the way, since MySpamSponge is new, you can have almost any handle you want. First come, first served, so the bright "early adopters" will get the best handles.

Web site trivia

The strangest thing that happened to me this year: Had someone told me in advance that I'd be interviewed by Susan Olsen, who used to play Cindy on The Brady Bunch, I would have been incredulous. Nevertheless, it happened. Susan's producer contacted me and requested the interview because Susan is avidly interested in medical topics, especially offbeat ones. Our conversation ranged from wacky reasons for visiting the ER to really wacky reasons for visiting the ER, such as when a woman called 911 and came to the ER via ambulance because she wondered if her (use your imagination, I'm censoring this in case any children are reading) was too loose. How did I approach this Earth-shattering emergency? Probably not in the way you might expect. If you're interested, I discussed it in my book and in the interview.

The strangest thing that happened to me as a result of writing my books: being offered a blind date with Katie Couric . . . yes, NBC's Katie Couric. If you're interested, here is an explanation of how that came about, and what happened.

Submit your picture for inclusion in my ER calendar

I'm seeking photos to include in an ER calendar, which will be sold worldwide. Suitable photographs include:

1. A photo of an ER doctor, nurse, tech, paramedic, or EMT, if you are particularly attractive. Typically, you will be pictured in your work clothes at work, but I'm willing to consider other photos, too, such as you lounging at the beach on your day off. The only prohibition is nudity; if you wouldn't show the picture to your 13-year-old niece, don't send it to me.

2. A photo showing some dramatic, poignant, or otherwise memorable ER moment.

Win a free* book
* = the book is free; you pay for the shipping

by entering a contest sponsored jointly by www.ERbook.net and Time Warner Trade Publishing. To enter, answer the following question: What are the pros and cons of being an ER doctor?

Send your submission to me via this page: www.myspamsponge.com/doctor.php Winners will be selected on the basis of how insightful, thought-provoking, and grammatically correct (believe me, I care nothing about political correctness!) their answers are. Winning submissions become the property of www.ERbook.net and may be published in exchange for the prize, Just Here Trying to Save a Few Lives: Tales of Life and Death from the ER by Pamela Grim, MD. I reviewed that book on my page of book reviews, which is why Time Warner was kind enough to promise to send me four or five copies of that book (which retails for $23.95) to give away in a contest.