by Allen Cardoza
Michell Au joined Dr. Melody Foxx to discuss her book, “This Won’t Hurt A bit” on LA Talk Radio. Her book offers an explicit account of the perils and joys of a modern medical education. She describes numerous anecdotes and shares her feelings about her experiences, ranging from the silly to the grim and from the heartwarming to the heartbreaking.
Although her parents were physicians, she started medical school with excessive idealism based on watching ER episodes. Her motivation was a vague notion about “helping people.”
“This This Won’t Hurt a Bit: (And Other White Lies): My Education in Medicine and Motherhood” is the story of one woman’s experience in learning how to become a real doctor.
Unlike most medical memoirs, however, this one details the author’s struggles to maintain a life outside of the hospital, in the small amount of free time she had to live it. And, after she and her husband have a baby early in both their medical residencies, Au explores the demands of being a parent while still practicing as a physician, two all-consuming jobs in which the lives of others are very literally in her hands.
The many stories in the book range across the entire gamut of human emotions, and the reader alternatively laughs and cries through it. Creating a new doctor and a new parent is apparently a messy, bewildering, yet amazingly rewarding experience. Similar to boot camp training in the army, the journey from medical school to a practice is indeed a difficult one.
Today Au is married to Dr. Joseph Walrath, and the couple have two sons. She works in Atlanta in a private practice as an an anesthesiologist. In 1999, she graduated from Wellesley College. In 2003, she received her M.D. from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and completed her residency in anesthesiology at the Columbia University Medical Center in Manhattan.
Listen to the interview with Michelle Au on Allen Cardoza’s website.
