Word: doctor
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...Canadian doctor of Vietnamese-Chinese origins, and uses his firsthand experience of the world of medicine to underpin the dozen stories in this book. The pieces are interrelated, lightly and adroitly, by the recurrence of four common characters, Fitzgerald, Chen, Ming and Sri, all doctors. In some stories, Lam writes about his characters in the third person; for others, he uses the first. In less adept hands, this technique could easily seem affected. But Lam's handling of the quickly shifting perspectives is deft and gives the collection an agreeable dynamism...
...their relationship. Ming is now seeing Chen - another student and someone, as we find out later in the collection, whom she will marry - while Fitzgerald is left behind in Ottawa to retake his exams. In the finest story in the book, Night Flight, we see Fitzgerald, now a medevac doctor with an incipient drinking problem, fly to Guatemala to rescue a young man who has had a stroke. Tightly sprung and impeccably paced, the story's devastating ending is followed by a coda of such searing yet sympathetic honesty that you are left feeling winded by its flawed humanity...
...Fitzgerald in the initial stages. The ending rewrites any kind of expectation that we may have held in our minds, given that these two men were once rivals in love, and gives a depthless generosity to the story. It is also marked by a wry sense of humor: the doctor treating Fitzgerald doesn't know that the patient's tremors are the withdrawal symptoms of an alcoholic so he charts them as an atypical symptom of the new disease...
...that she had been competing - and landing - on a broken bone. "Right after I got the X-ray, I got the diagnosis and had a little breakdown," she told TIME. "And the reason was that I didn't want to be asked off the team. We talked to our doctor, and got the opinions of others, and I didn't think I would make it worse by competing, because the bone was still in alignment...
...tried to read some positive books. You know, stay happy. Watch a movie. The doctor in Germany told me, you can't sit around doing nothing. That's going to weigh on you the most, when you're not doing anything. So it was more like, do something else to make it look positive. I have to lift weights to keep my body strong. So: lift. Keep it strong...