Match Day: One Day and One Dramatic Year in the Lives of Three New Doctors
Match Day: One Day and One Dramatic Year in the Lives of Three New Doctors Books
- ISBN13: 9780312602949
- Shape up: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Each year on the third Thursday in March, more than fifteen thousand graduating medical students exult, despair, and endure Match Day: the result of a computer algorithm that assigns students to their sickbay residencies in nearly every field of medicine. The match determines the crucial first job as an intern, and ultimately shapes the rest of his—or, in increasing numbers, her—life.
Match Day follows three women from the nervous months of preparation before the match through the completion of their first full year of internship. Each has long dreamed of apt a doctor. Stephanie Chao is beginning her career as a general practitioner. Rakhi Barkowski must balance her spouse’s aspirations with her own desire to work in internal medicine. Michelle LaFonda moves forward in her quest to become a radiologist, but struggles to find progress in her private relationship. Each woman makes mistakes, saves lives, and witnesses death; each must recognize the balancing act of family and career; and each comes to learn what it means to heal, to comfort, to lose, and to grieve, all even as maintaining a professional demeanor.
Just as One L became the essential book about the education of young attorneys, so Match Day will be for every medical student, doctor, and reader interested in medicine: a guide to what to guess, an insightful account of the changing world of doctors, and a dramatic recollection of this pressured, perilous, challenging, and rewarding time of life.
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I just didn’t care for this book because I don’t reckon the author, Brian Eule selected young physicians to write about who are representative of young physicians in America.
There is an underlying theme throughout the book that young medical students by the side of with interns and residents just want to be like everyone else in their U-Tube generation. That’s nonsense.
Medical students, interns and residents know perfectly well they are gifted and need to jump through an endless list of academic and scholarly hoops like none of their non-medical peers in order to become a real Doctor.
As a manager I have worked with physicians – young and ancient – for thirty years and in fact several of my friends are physicians. But none of them are like my non-medical colleagues and friends. My Doc friends are there if they can make it and I watch out from their spouses and children if they are called away…and I reckon nothing about it.
Unfortunately the author, Brian Eule is suggesting that physicians in training guess to be just like their non-medical peers and are slightly aggravated if their life does not turn out that way. Asinine.
Doctors are expected to plot with one side of their brain and react with the other side at the same time…
flawlessly.
The scene where a boyfriend has a desire to toss his physician girlfriend’s pager into the toilet was just over-the-top disrespectful to the profession of Medicine, in my attitude.
If you want to know about Match-Day for medical students…Google is your supporter.
Rating: 1 / 5
This is certainly an fascinating look at their lifestyle. In particular, I have greater respect for female residents knowing that they have to carefully juggle their family life with their career, moreso than male residents.
There are a lot of hokey moments in this book, too. Lots of hand holding goes on, meaning lots of the book focuses on how the residents make a difference in their patients’ lives. I don’t doubt this, but there is definltey not as much hand-holding and crying-on-your-shoulder in real life as the author would have you judge. Also, the saga between Michele and Ted got a small high-schoolish at times, as did the descriptions of them.
All in all it was a excellent book with some excellent moments. Not a lot of substance, but not a terrible read, either.
Rating: 3 / 5
There is a whole crop of books about the experience of going through medical school and learning what involved medicine is really about, from authors too numerous to mention. None of the themes that are really at the heart of Brian Eule’s intriguing and well-written book will strike anyone who has ready any of those as particularly novel; exhaustion, the recognition of a new doctor’s limited knowledge, confrontations with death, the quest to balance private life with the horrible demands of medical internships are all topics that have been extensively explored in nonfiction like this as well as in memoirs.
Eule does seem to set out on a different track in this book, presenting it to the reader as a look at the system by which graduating medical students are ‘matched’ with internship programs across the nation, determining the shape of their medical careers. It’s that part of the book — his examination of how the three women at the heart of his tale arrive at their choice to become doctors, what they choose to specialize in (surgery, radiology, internal medicine) and how crucial the selection of an internship becomes to not only them but their partners or husbands — that is by far the strongest part of this book and the reason I’ve given it a fourth star. (Another huge plus: one of the three women he follows is his girlfriend, Stephanie; her decisions will affect his own life in many ways he can’t even presume and his involvement not only as narrator but a character make the tale far richer.)
But once the matches between med student and internship program are made, Eule returns to territory that has already been excessively well-trodden and leaves him small scope to say much that is fresh or surprising, outside of his private experiences. That isn’t to say that the experiences of the three new doctors isn’t fascinating — it is — just that none of it will be revelatory. What would have been more intriguing to me as a reader from outside the world of medicine is if Eule had ventured further abroad and talked to people beyond his core characters. What happens when someone ends up with a terrible ‘match’? Is medical divorce possible? What about those who aren’t matched and must scramble to get one of the remaining internships in only a few days? Do some end up settling for second best to learn later that that was OK? Or…? There were some fascinating questions that Eule left unexplored that would have made this a far more compelling book.
Unless you’re a doctor — or contemplating marrying a med student — I’d suggest coming up until this is in paperback. I’ve rated it 3.5 stars, but more as a successful memoir than as a probing look at the medical profession and the match administer, which it may possibly have dealt with far more absolutely. Even as vivid and very well written — it feels as if Eule must have been a glide on the wall at particularly crucial moments — ultimately this didn’t live up to my expectations.
Rating: 4 / 5
Just when it seemed there’s nothing new to be written about the medical profession, Brian Eule presents an absorbing book that addresses both private and environmental aspects of 21st century medical training. I painstakingly loved meeting the three women and their significant others. I found I cared about what happened to them. And at the same time, I got a sense of the context in which to view their experience.
Stephanie, Rakhi and Michele all seem to be extraordinarily gifted women. Each received awards and each was recognized as outstanding by her prestigious institution. Yet even talent can’t compensate for the rigorous demands of the schedule and the system.
Brian is part of the tale because he’s caught up with Stephanie, the brilliant future general practitioner who aced the MCATs in her sophomore year at Stanford. I admire the way he shares his close moments with Stephanie (especially his proposal of marriage), juxtaposed with insights into the broader implications of medical training. I appreciated the background tale – told with just enough detail – of the Libby Zion case that led to changes in residents’ hours.
It’s terrifying to reckon of being sincerely ill in a sickbay below the care of doctors in training. I’ve read books by doctors who were patients; they everlastingly said, “Page the attending.”
I realize the book had to end with the residents’ first year in order to be contemporary. But I wonder how the women are doing as they progress and I wonder how their lives are different. My former neighbor was a fourth year anesthesiology resident. She went to the gym and went out to dinner with her spouse; she seemed relaxed and smiling most of the time. So I wonder if we’re seeing only the most terrible part of the administer.
Eule doesn’t address how this rigorous training and delayed professional entry affects the way doctors handle patients, once they’re finally finished. Will they still be human and caring or will they become tired, cynical or arrogant?
Generally Match Day is a painstakingly enjoyable read, focusing more on the lives of the people than on the medical side. I am already looking forward to the author’s next book.
Rating: 5 / 5
A very fascinating look into the lives of first year medical residents. The whole “match day” administer was very fascinating. This was a very quick read for me. The book renewed my respect for doctors. I’d like a follow-up on what happens to these doctors in the next few years of their residencies!
Rating: 5 / 5