Trauma junkies are people who feed on danger and stress. They do their best work under pressure. Janice Hudson was an adrenaline-charged emergency room nurse in a San Francisco-area hospital when a friend told her about CALSTAR, a fledgling helicopter ambulance service with an opening for a flight nurse. Weeks later she was swooping over the Bay Area to scenes of shootings, accidents and disasters. The trauma junkie had found her element.
Hudson spent ten years as a flight nurse, answering calls that were by turns horrifying, heroic and absurd. She decries her personal flights from hell that involved children and drunk drivers. In this moving story, she recalls her triumphs, like the time she performed a surgical cricothyrotomy on a patient as he hung upside down in his overturned car -- in the dark. And she shakes her head at some of the bizarre calls, like the one that took her to the scene of a suspicious mountain lion attack (there are no mountain lions in the Bay Area). But no matter what the call, CALSTAR and its dedicated crew braved danger and hardship to reach the scene of catastrophe in a race against time to bring help to those whose only hope of survival lay in the speed of the helicopter and the skill of the medical crew.
A born storyteller, Janice Hudson writes with compassion, insight and wry humor. Trauma Junkie is an in-the-trenches account of emergency nursing at its most demanding.
Is there an afterlife? Janice Hudson, who's seen her share of death, ventures an assuring yes in this memoir about her years as a trauma nurse.In May 1987, newlywed intensive-care nurse Hudson was recruited to join a helicopter ambulance service and "fly out to accidents, scrape up the patients and try to get them to qualified care in that first 'golden hour,' when they'd have the best chance for meaningful survival after traumatic injuries." The possibilities for traumatic injury are, of course, legion. Hudson hits on the usual suspects: barroom brawls, failed suicide attempts, and grisly car wrecks. She also recounts what are likely to be some of the more unusual cases in the annals of emergency medicine, including a call from a woman who insisted that her mountaintop home was being overrun by an army of mountain lions (which turned out to be a single housecat, amplified thanks to the caller's diet of alcohol and crystal meth). Death is a constant in her pages (and death itself isn't so bad, she observes: "It's the circumstances that are tragic"). But so is Hudson's belief that something interesting awaits us afterward, as a few of her eerie anecdotes attest.
Doctors' and medical researchers' memoirs are many; those of nurses are comparatively few. Well written and thoughtful, Hudson's is a welcome addition to that small literature--though it's definitely not for the squeamish. --Gregory McNamee .
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