I'm Alan Alder and this is Clear In Vivid, conversations about connecting and communicating.

What we forget is caregivers is that the decision to come to the emergency department,

to leave your day, to leave your responsibilities of the day whether it's work or caregiving

or whatever, having fun, going shopping, doing chores is a narrative event in their life.

You know, so even when patients come in and say, oh, that person has nothing, no, they

have something.

There's something that got them out of bed in the middle of the night, or got them

let to leave work to come in and talk to us and tell us their story.

We have to find out what that is.

That's EAR Dr. J. Baruch.

He's a writer as well as a physician and his two passions have combined in his recent

book.

It's called Tornado of Life, a doctor's journey through constraints and creativity in the

EAR.

In it he tells how thinking like a writer and listening to the stories of the patients

who come to the EAR is at least as important as the usual battery of clinical tests.

This is great.

The best place to start, I think, is the fascinating title of your book, Tornado of Life.

What's the story behind that?

Yeah.

The story behind that, Alan, is this year and years ago, and I had a, I was caring for a

young woman in the middle of the night, as often as times these stories often take place.

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