I truly wish I had the sense to read a book like Katrina Firlik’s Another Day in the Frontal Lobe during my formative years. Instead, I was reading “fantasy” fiction like Sweet Valley High that is junkier and more superficial (glossing just the surface) than television ever is. In general, to learn, I need to read rather than learn about something through visuals and auditory input like television, like the medical drama ER.

If I had read this book in my youth with an open and receptive mind, I may have appreciated the different specialties and subspecialties of medicine and how, after medical school, there’s a specialty that caters to everyone’s personality. Don’t like people? Pathologists don’t deal so much with people. Don’t like blood? Psychiatry or radiology. Want normal hours? Several specialities have sane hours and the doctors are not on call. Want to be like a researcher? Pathologists work in a lab. Want a repetitive job yet have a “Dr.” title? General medicine.

I also wish I knew that not all nurses are triage nurses and that ones who get into administration (and some other specialties) can demote the importance of bedside manner. Who could have forecasted that nurses these days can have more responsibility and become nurse practitioners?

A female cousin of mine went through neurosurgery training, also in the States, so I felt like I was reading my cousin’s memoir. In fact, I could convince myself that the author, from her author picture, looks like my cousin!

I enjoyed most the earlier chapters of the novel where Firlik exposed more of the how to be to be a neurosurgeon while the later chapters were philosophical about “why” and issues and so forth.

A co-worker noticed my recent space of “medical” novels: midwives in The Birth House, short stories in Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, and finally Another Day in the Frontal Lobe. She remarked, “Gee, you should be a nurse!” It was meant, of course, with the idea of a triage nurse. Gee, Co-Worker, you don’t actually know me!

I’ll leave you with two quotes that impressed me.

* Firlik writes about the big decision to become a neurosurgeon. Her description easily fits for the decision to get a Ph.D. I love how she makes a developmental biology analogy. :D

“The decision to become a neurosurgeon places you on a track that runs, unabated, through a seven-year tunnel … At the end of the tunnel, the formerly undifferentiated M.D. emerges as an exquisitely super-specialized neurosurgeon, squinting at the rest of the world - a rare animal dominating a small niche within the ecosystem of medicine. At that point, you feel unqualified to do anything else, even if you had any lingering thoughts about a career change.”

* In the following quote, Firlik champions her specialty. As if we needed any convincing.
“I love watching the Parade of Nations during the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. As the athletes stream into the stadium, I read off the name of each country and remark on how many athletes follow along behind each sign. I have a special affection for the smaller nations with smaller representation, like Malta and East Timor. I root for these athletes. In the world of medicine, neurosurgery is one of the smaller countries with fewer athletes trailing behind its sign. Internal medicine, pediatrics, obstetrics, and gynecology, to name just a few - those are much larger. There’s no need to feel sorry for us, though. We’re well trained. As a nation, we don’t struggle that much. Neurosurgery is similar to one of the Scandanavian countries - small but elite and with an impressive gross domestic product relative to its size. In fact, at large academic medical centers, our economy often helps support the more populous but less economically sound Sudans of medicine. You might consider rooting for one of them.

Your response: