Michael J. Collins
Mike's highly successful first two books, Hot Lights, Cold Steel and Blue Collar, Blue Scrubs have become standards in the field of medical memoir.
His latest work, All Bleeding Stops, was released in 2021. What does a doctor do when he thinks his best is not good enough? All too often, the sensitivity that leads young men and women to a career in medicine becomes the instrument of their own destruction. They simply care too much. Nowhere is this cruel irony more clearly seen than in the setting of war.
Matthew Barrett, fresh out of residency, is sent to Vietnam as a combat surgeon in 1967 at the height of the Vietnam war. Sensitive and caring to a fault, he is ill-prepared for the onslaught of pain and suffering with which he must deal. Only the love of Therese Hopkins, a nurse, keeps him from falling apart. But can their love survive the horrors of war?
In the end, it is Therese who helps Matthew realize that love and compassion are the only things that can make all bleeding stop.
“It was the first time I had ever seen someone die, and it wasn't what I expected...I stood there waiting for something momentous to happen, for someone to say something profound, but there was nothing...I still had the childish notion that since my life was so important, all lives were so important. Since my death would be so cataclysmic, all deaths would be so cataclysmic.”
“Why do we always think our pain will be less if we can make others suffer more?”
“And of course she's sad about losing her leg, but she says it's made her realise how many things she hasn't lost...it's like a millionaire who loses a thousand dollars- he's sad, but he's still not that bad off.”
“I'm taking inorganic chem and physics not because I want to but because I have to. Not every doctor wants to be a scientist. Some of us just want to take care of sick people. I can't help thinking that medicine is more closely aligned to the humanities than to the sciences. I can't help thinking that I could learn more about being a good doctor from William Shakespeare than I could from Isaac Newton. After all, isn't understanding people at least as important as understanding pathology?”
“We, who should know better, reinforce every patient's desire to hide from the reality of his own mortality.”
“I'm the dumb kid from the West Side of Chicago who has no business being at a place like this. I've got one long, tough road ahead of me.”
“I'm starting to realize that I can't be a child forever, that I don't want to be a child forever. I've had my turn, and now it's time to grow up.”
“At times it felt like I was killing myself. And yet the only thing I could recall at that moment was how much fun it had been, and how wonderful it was to do this for a living.”