"Critical Access Medicine" by Olliver Went

Current Tags

medicine, true stories, drama, emergency, covid, death, thrilling

Categories

Action & Adventure / Thriller

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Critical Access Medicine

Author's Description

I'm an emergency medicine physician with over twenty years experience, mostly in small rural emergency rooms. These stories are based on real events. Details have been changed for privacy but the stories are real. There is a disconnect between what the public thinks happens in an emergency room and what really happens. Nothing is going to change until you first understand what is happening. Read these stories and understand these are real people and it could be you some day.

Why I Chose it

Ever wonder what it's like working cases in the emergency room? Now you can tag along, including for the case of the guy with the nail in his vertebra in the x-ray above. (I'm not a human doctor, but I was a veterinarian, and everything in the first three episodes rings true.)

[15 episodes, 9 in the last 30 days]

Who Might Like This

Stories from the ER — who doesn't love that sort of thing?

Unrelated Griping

Ooh, the "Top Faved" list changed! (Yeah, still the same five but some of them switched places.) It takes up half the screen. That list is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy — they're the top faved, but they're also the only ones shown to new users, so...

"(I Just Wanna Be) 51% HAPPY" by Beri Balistreri MSW

Current Tags

memoir, healthcare, dark humor, spiritual, biography, life, inspiration

Categories

Non-Fiction

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(I Just Wanna Be) 51% HAPPY

Author's Description

A sometimes hair-raising, dark, and surprisingly humorous account of my year leading up to the virus. I'm a medical social worker visiting patients in their homes here on the windswept central coast of California, until I mysteriously can't breathe. They say healthcare professionals are 'wounded healers,' meaning that we go into these professions to fix ourselves. It's a wonderful feeling to realize that a 51% happy life is good enough. P.S. Names and details have been changed for privacy.

Why I Chose it

Look, any time you read something by anyone who works in healthcare in the US, you know from the start it's going to be at least part depressing and really infuriating. But this is also fascinating and I already care about her patient in episode one.

[48 episodes so far, with 0 updates in the last 30 days. (I'm assuming this one is complete based on the number of episodes. Sure would be nice if it was possible to tell from the user interface...)]

Who Might Like This

Anyone who enjoys reading about interesting people with real problems.

Unrelated Griping

No gripes today. I'm running an experiment with a 15-episode story under a different pen name to get an idea of how release frequency and total number of episodes affects the monthly bonus. (This experiment depends on the story having roughly the same readership as Dragon Freehold, i.e., about two people, but I think that's likely since I have yet to figure out how to effectively advertise.)

If I had designed my experiment better, I would have multiple stories releasing at the same time with the same length and different release frequencies, but that would require more effort than I'm willing to put into it right now. Maybe later.

Anyhow, the more interesting thing I've learned so far is the "Recently Added Stories" section doesn't get updated when stories go live. I assumed it would.