BookLife Review by Carol O'Day: The Beauty in Breaking (author, Michele Harper)
memoir, emergency room doctor, trauma, resilience, healing, stress, compassion, health care justice
In The Beauty in Breaking, author and Emergency Room physician Michele Harper takes the reader along on her own journey of emotional healing. She learns lessons that allow her to heal and grow through her work. Harper is a female African-American emergency room physician, a distinct minority in the field of white and male colleagues. After completing medical school and training at Harvard University, she accepts a position at a Emergency Medicine program at a hospital in Philadelphia, only to learn that her long-term boyfriend will not make the move with her and she is suddenly single in a new city.
The patients she, and we as readers, encounter in the emergency rooms are often very ill, sometimes addicted to one or more substances, often without adequate resources or support to heal, and sometimes barely surviving. The patients who come to the ER for care are often long-suffering, with chronic and acute medical conditions, and often poor. Harper exercises extraordinary patience with the patients she encounters. Her race gives her an added dose of credibility with some who have been mistreated and ignored for a lifetime. Despite her skill and compassion, the system-wide deficiencies in the U.S. health care system hamstring her at times and often fail to provide adequate or lasting healing to her patients.
On this journey, Harper heals herself. She hones her compassion, deepens her sense of injustice and justice, finds gratitude, shares the gifts of time and attention, and identifies her own resilient core. The language and writing in this book is vivid, soft, glaring, and revelatory. The Beauty in Breaking will both dishearten and uplift you.