Nonfiction Book Reviews

I have mixed feelings about Intern: A Doctor’s Initiation by Sandeep Jauhar. It was a very hard book for me to get into, and in fact, I put it down for a month and didn’t touch it at all. I just couldn’t force myself to read it.

It’s the story of Sandeep Jauhar, whose older brother was a doctor, and whose parents wanted him to be a doctor too. Sandeep didn’t want to be a doctor because he was ill-suited for the profession (he was a thinker, not a doer - his words - and he also didn’t like blood). He also didn’t want to be a doctor because his parents wanted him to be a doctor.  Mature, I know.  It only gets worse.

So he got a PhD in Physics instead, which at the end of his schooling, he promptly decided that he didn’t want to be a physicist. So then he did nothing.

A few months later, he decided that he wanted to be a doctor (he’s not even sure why - he just decided to do it) and when he told his parents, they were understandably upset with him because this meant years of more schooling, and he was rather late getting to the game, not to mention all the money he had spent on his last doctorate degree.

Instead of letting that deter him, he said that his parents not wanting him to do it solidified his decision because apparently the only thing he wanted to do was what his parents didn’t want him to do.

Do you see why this book absolutely drove me crazy? He was indecisive, immature, and making huge mistakes for the heck of it, as far as I could tell.

So against his parents wishes, he enrolled in school yet again, this time to become a doctor. He gets through three years of school, and then becomes an intern at the New York City Hospital, where he promptly hates his life. He hates being a doctor, he isn’t good at it, he doesn’t really like the medicine world, and he doesn’t ever want to learn anything more than what he absolutely has to. A doctor was trying to explain the difference between two different kinds of medicine, and Sandeep basically said he didn’t give a darn.

All of this made me pretty frustrated with the book.  I went to Amazon at one point to look at the ratings for it, and was shocked to see it getting 4 and 5 star ratings.  Was someone reading a different book than I was? So far, there had been little to recommend it.

I decided to give it another 50 pages, which would have brought me to just over halfway through the book. If it didn’t turn around by then, I was giving it up for good. Perhaps it was going to be another Hope’s Boy, where I just never saw why other people liked it.

I hit the end of the 50 pages, and just kept going. It finally, finally started getting good. He started doing better at his job - caring about the patients more, having a better attitude about getting things done, and wanting to learn more about medicine instead of skating by with whatever he could get away with.

His second year, when he became a junior resident, went much better for him, and the book took a definite turn for the better. It was thoroughly interesting to me to see how difficult the field of medicine really is. The quality of life debate was a huge theme in this book - the doctors were able to keep someone alive, but at what cost? Should someone really be kept on life support when there was no chance of them getting better?

And what about patients who purposefully chose the choice that in the end would kill them? He had a patient who loved to eat, but when he swallowed, the food would sometimes end up in his lungs. Eating was literally killing him. But the patient loved to eat so much that not being allowed to eat was killing him too. Should the doctors allow him to eat, even when that choice meant eventual death?

Anyone who has spent a lot of time in a hospital being treated for a serious disease like cancer or leukemia would relate to Sandeep’s discussions of whether the cure really was better than just letting the disease run its course. Sometimes, the doctors would stop administering to a patient because they had given up all hope of curing him, and as soon as that happened, the patient would miraculously start to get better.  Sometimes the best medicine was to simply get out of the way of the body’s natural ability to heal itself, which Sandeep discusses quite often.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is chronically ill, or who has a loved one who is chronically ill. I think they would relate to much of what Sandeep talks about.  I would also recommend it to anyone looking at going into medicine as a career. But if you don’t have a whole lot of interest in hospitals, medicine, or doctors, skip this one. There would be better memoirs out there to read.

Overall, I’d have to give 4 out of 5 stars. I liked the writing style and I enjoyed the patient stories, but the book just took too long to get good.

Hava