In delving into the lives of three young doctors”their chase for the right residency and the personal costs of following the acknowledged challenge of the career”author Brian Eule has produced an informative and exciting book. The former Palisadian will be talking about ‘Match Day’ (St. Martin’s Press) on Friday, April 17 at 7:30 p.m. at Village Books, 1049 Swarthmore. Journalist Eule follows the course of three young women, newly minted physicians, from the nail-biting drama that surrounds ‘The Match’ ‘when the hospital chooses its first-year residents”to the pressures and demands of the first intern year. In doing so, Eule has created a nonfiction book that offers as much intense emotion, joy and pain as the most stirring TV medical drama. ‘I always feel comfortable in the narrative nonfiction genre,’ Eule says. ‘For me, as a reader and writer, the form has more power than fiction while incorporating the elements of fiction’character development, plot and tension.’ The book’s topic was a natural for Eule, 30, who lived through the highly stressful year that his girlfriend (now wife) Stephanie spent securing her preferred residency. After graduating from Stanford Medical School, she began the interview process with various hospitals around the country in hopes that her first choice would mesh with the hospital’s offer. Eule was encouraged that this could be a book while pursuing his MFA in writing at Columbia in 2005. He was introduced to a group of students who were in their final year at New York Medical College and preparing, along with the estimated 15,000 medical school graduates, for the important next step. The reader gets to know Michele and Ted, both medical students, who must deal with the possibility that they will find residencies on opposite sides of the country. We learn about tension between medical student Rakhi and her husband Scott, who is also pursuing acceptance to a Ph.D. program. Stephanie and Brian, too, begin to realize the exigencies of maintaining an intimate relationship in view of the seven-to-eight-year surgery residency Stephanie wants to complete. Through the course of researching the book and grappling with his own feelings of being the ‘supportive’ partner, Eule began to understand more clearly things that he had taken for granted, such as the excruciatingly long hours interns work and the changing face of medicine. ‘This big debate about how many hours these interns work is not a black or white issue,’ he says. ‘There are major concerns on both sides: continuity of care and concern that you want a doctor who has been with the patient from the time he or she was admitted to the hospital, versus the dangers of exhausted residents to patients, and to themselves. ‘The other thing I learned is that there needs to be more flexibility in residency programs,’ Eule says. ‘This is a program where these interns are put in charge of other people’s health and lives, which often precludes the flexibility to take care of their own lives. With more and more women in medicine (50 percent of medical students are female), there needs to be more flexibility, especially if the woman wants children. While Eule recognizes the pressures on the intern, he has also learned to navigate his part in the relationship. ‘A little bit of extra patience and a sense of humor helps, but in the end, everyone has to learn how it can work in their own relationship.’ Both Brian and Stephanie share the importance of family and anticipate children of their own some day. ‘My own father showed me the priority of family,’ says Eule, who lost his father to cancer when he was a junior at Palisades High. ‘Dad was a very successful lawyer, but after he had cancer the first time [he lived 15 years on borrowed time], he reshaped his schedule to have more time with me and my sister Lisa. ‘I am not living in a bubble and understand that we all have a limited amount of time.’ Eule, who is currently working in communications for a nonprofit organization and living happily with a doctor in the house, hopes that his book will be relevant for a number of reasons. ‘I hope this book exposes the balancing act and the complexity of that balancing act that starts with ‘The Match.’ The intern is relinquishing control over her life, but at the same time doing very important work. I hope this brings a little bit of attention to the changing face of medicine. Seventy-two percent of practicing physicians are male, but that is changing. I hope that readers will learn about the process and culture of the medical world and also hope a lot of people going into medicine can use this and share it with their loved ones.’
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