You Went to Emergency for What?
Description
When paramedic Tim Booth ends up rushing a patient's dead cat to a human hospital's Emergency Department for resuscitation, he can't help wondering where his career took a wrong turn.
From bedroom mishaps and hypochondriacs to mysterious rashes and freak cattle incidents, the doctors, nurses, and paramedics in our EDs have seen it all. Every day, Tim and his colleagues grapple with burnout, an overstretched healthcare system, and compassion fatigue--fueled mostly by caffeine, dark humor, and a stubborn drive to save lives. But the Hollywood-style hero moments are rare as they wade through the chaotic, absurd, and often downright ridiculous realities of emergency medicine.
Written like a night shift in the ED--dark, unpredictable, and guaranteed to make you question humanity's collective IQ--You Went to Emergency for What? reveals the weirdest, funniest, and most heart-wrenching true stories from inside our hospitals.
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Tim Booth has been a paramedic for more than nine years, working across some of the most demanding environments in New South Wales. As an intensive care paramedic, he spent six years in southwest Sydney treating the sickest, strangest and silliest patients who dialed 000 with every imaginable emergency--from genuine trauma to baffling triviality. Before entering healthcare, Tim worked as a motoring journalist for Top Gear Australia magazine.
After realizing he didn't want a 9-to-5 office job--but still wanted to drive like The Stig--he swapped Mercedes sports cars for Mercedes vans with flashing lights and left the media industry to study paramedicine. He honed his skills in the high-pressure suburbs of Bankstown, Liverpool and Campbelltown, and earned the highest clinical level of paramedic--intensive care paramedic--just three years into his career. Having weathered the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic in one of the country's toughest ambulance districts, Tim eventually traded the chaos of southwest Sydney for a calmer life as a paramedic on the north coast of NSW.
Tim's first book, You Called an Ambulance for What?, plunged readers into the gritty, chaotic world of emergency medicine in southwest Sydney. Writing it nearly caused him more headaches than the job itself, but his talent for landing in outrageous situations--and retelling them with sharp humor--has brought him back for more. Somehow, he still manages to keep his day job, as long as his storytelling stays just shy of career suicide.