Hello everyone! As I promised yesterday I'll be making my review of this beautiful book that I recently just finished reading. I hope everyone is doing okay, today outside I can see a lot of smoke happening in my area, I couldn't see the actual fire so I think our area is okay for the most part but I hope everyone will stay safe.
Introduce The Book:
Michele Harper is a female, African American emergency room physician in a profession that is overwhelmingly male and white. Brought up in Washington D.C., in a complicated family, she went to Harvard, where she met her husband. They stayed together through medical school until two months before she was scheduled to join the staff of a hospital in central Philadelphia, when he told her he couldn't move with her. Her marriage at an end, Harper began her new life in a new city, in a new job, as a newly single woman.
In the ensuing years, as Harper learned to become an effective ER physician, bringing insight and empathy to every patient encounter, she came to understand that each of us is broken -- physically, emotionally, psychically. How we recognize those breaks, how we try to mend them, and where we go from there are all crucial parts of the healing process.
Let's Talk About The Book:
This book is essentially about a African American woman's journey in her profession that is predominantly dominated by white males. It deals with a lot of topics that cover self discovery and what it means to heal as we encounter different perspectives throughout the book. It also shines a light on how tragedies can be beautiful as they shape us from our past to present.
Favorite Part Of The Book:
I honestly just loved being apart of all the stories that her patients would disclose to her. The best story is the last one as it wraps up the book beautifully with the purpose of the book.
Con:
One con that I can think of is that maybe the overall aspect about healing could be repetitive, the journey was nice but sometimes the healing sounded to be the same.
Mental Health Tie ins:
There's an article that talks about psychological healing and wellness if anyone is interested in learning about it more. It makes great points that show the basis of taking care of yourself through healing.
Psychological Healing and wellness
Throughout this book we get the central theme of both healing and grieving. But what is grief?
Grief is the acute pain that accompanies loss, and throughout grief we have seen that many people begin to go in a cycle of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and then acceptance, and this is called the 5 stages of grief.
This is a beautiful video that shows how one can heal from emotional trauma.
And here is a video that shows how complicated grief really is.
Annotations:
" I had to go downstairs. I had to stop it. I had to help my older brother, who was on his way into the fray. I had to stop my father from killing my mother"
- what a powerful line in the book, we see a lot of Michele's past with her fathers and mothers relationship and throughout the book we see these complex issues come back up every so often. The trauma of it all was still present.
" For these same reasons -- their white privilege -- she would have followed their instruction anywhere, even if they directed her to literally break the law"
- We get to see Harper's insight of just how crucial it is to break down systemic racism in the medical field, for some reason a lot of people still question the knowledge that Harper has already shown.
" As I noted the contrast of my dark wrists extending from the cuffs of my stark white coat, I was reminded of which costumes in America, even in the twenty-first century, are seen as legitimate and which are not"
- oh man this quote jumped out at me while I was reading it, of course the improvements that we have seen is great but we still have a lot of work to do in terms of progress with stereotypes, systemic racism and injustice.
" If we're lucky, we're touched at every station along the journey, and if nothing else, then at the end."
- I really liked this quote because this showed to me just the haunting beauty that death can bring, when someone's time is up and how we treat it, is all part of the process.
" That's truly how it is, isn't it? As long as we're willing to move forward, to nourish our body and spirit and allow for the disintegration of any attachment to patterns that do not serve us, without our understanding exactly how the next bits will fall into place, beautiful outcomes do unfold"
- This quote reminds me of the possibility that self love has for us, it shows that without a doubt we have a marked route that is planned for us and how we choose to distinguish ourselves and care for ourselves then that is when we will be truly happy and content of the outcomes we deserve in life.
Well that was the last of the annotations that I had for this book, I really enjoyed this book a lot and I'm actually going to keep it because it was just that damn beautiful, I have some exciting books that I'll be able to read very soon so I'm excited for what's to come next in this book blog, until next time guys! I hope you all have a nice day and please stay safe!
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