Well, Doc, It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time! : The Unexpected Adventures of a Trauma Surgeon

CELEBRATING MORE THAN 300 CONSECUTIVE WEEKS ATOP THE DOCTORS & MEDICINE HUMOR BESTSELLER CHARTS!

There are things a man doesn’t talk about. And then there are the things he writes down.

No one would believe them otherwise. Meet Dr. Paul Waymack: trauma surgeon, burn specialist, military officer, and—for a time—Cold War envoy operating under presidential orders with Soviet agents watching his every move.

See the world’s dangers through the eyes of a man who is most at home when everyone else is falling apart. Have you ever wondered how people live with what they've seen? This is the answer. One story at a time.

Well, Doc, It Seemed Like a Good Idea At The Time! is two decades’ worth of unfiltered, jaw-dropping, darkly hilarious true stories from the ER, the battlefield, the burn ward, and the bureaucratic hellscape of government medicine.

• A patient wakes up mid–open-heart surgery and grabs the surgeon’s head.
• A 700-lb patient is moved with a horse sling, an engine hoist, and surgeons' ingenuity.
• A woman is shot over burnt toast. Then her family starts a riot in the emergency room.
• Soviet doctors' idea of advanced burn care: unsterilized pig spleen and vodka.
• A surgeon performs a procedure he’s never attempted before because there’s no time not to.

And dozens more. All true. All witnessed. All recorded in the journal Dr. Waymack kept from med school through his rise to Chief of Surgical Studies at the U.S. Army Burn Center. Dr. Waymack reviewed drug applications for the FDA, founded a pharmaceutical company, and still got blindsided by patients, politicians, and the occasional naked man sprinting through the ER parking lot.

If This Is Going to Hurt, MASH*, House M.D., or When Breath Becomes Air are on your shelf, this book belongs in your hands.

Harrowing, acerbic, compassionate, and absolutely impossible to put down.