Jacob Szymanski

But then you jump to these stories of your colleagues in the healthcare system, just sort of show the big picture of what it's like and what it could be and what it was in the past to get a really good idea of what it is.

Now, you've seen hordes of patients, hundreds every night.

How did you decide which of those patients ended up making it into the book?

Now, when you're saying all of this, it's not looking good.

Times are rough for patients, for healthcare workers, for everybody involved.

How do you hope your readers react to this book and what you're pointing out?

You also told the story in the book of an emergency room doctor who, uh, was finishing up a shift and then find out that they were in a clinic in the North, I think desperately needed somebody to fill in.

And so the doctor only hours after finishing the shift, got his buddy to fly him over into a sketchy little strip to, uh, to land the plane.

And, uh, he did another shift, um,

hundreds of kilometers away, just so he could fill them.

There's all sorts of characters in this book.

I mean, anybody who works in a stressful environment like that, your character is going to come out one way or another.

And just a lot of the people you talk about here have remarkable stories and resilience.

And partly...

Because of something that really struck me in the book.

And that's that you doctors, when you're dealing with patients, you have to deal with so many nuanced situations and way things.

Like, for example, like when you get a patient who's young, you have to fight your biases and ideas that bad things don't happen to young people.

No, bad things do happen to young people.

And also sometimes patients might leave information out because they're embarrassed or something.

Like there was one patient that you talk about in the book who is like not a nerve awaits guy, but he was taking Ozempic or like a knockoff Ozempic.