An anesthesiologist’s account of his failures, triumphs, and lessons learned, in the business of knocking people unconscious.
Anesthetizing people is actually really quite tricky, and Wolf Pascoe’s memoir BREATHING FOR TWO tries to convey some of this. His descriptions of incidents in which he came to within a hair’s breadth of losing patients give the reader a pretty good sense of how difficult and how stressful his job is. Along the way, Pascoe also relates the history of his field, starting with early experiments with ether in the 1800s, and relating these history lessons to his work in the “present.”
As that description may have betrayed, BREATHING FOR TWO often comes off like a series of personal essays. Like a lot of the best personal essays, it mixes the personal with the universal, going back and forth in time and in subject matter.
BREATHING FOR TWO’S biggest asset is probably the writing style. The text creates what could otherwise be called suspense (though it might be in poor taste in this taste here, considering that these are real people): “My insides turned buttery as I began to grasp the magnitude of my error. It was cardinal and unforgivable: I had paralyzed a patient whom I couldn’t mask. It was something I’d been taught not to do, and I’d never done before or since. To this day, I can’t say precisely what provoked this lapse. But lapse is too kind a word. Hubris, the Greeks might have called it. Delirium is more like it.”
Its biggest drawbacks are, in brief, that for one thing, while Pascoe does a very good job of connecting history with his story, the text never really seems to have any identifiable unified themes: just a series of observations (albeit very interesting ones.) For another, perhaps by design, we never really get much of a sense of the author outside of his profession. Finally, the glut of medical jargon, while usually deployed sparingly and explained thoroughly, can nonetheless get a little overwhelming.
BREATHING FOR TWO is a memoir that successfully conveys the hidden world of the anesthesiologist, and all the complexity and weirdness that the medical profession, in general, engenders. The intriguing writing and the insight mostly make up for its shortcomings.
Reviewed by Chaz Baker for IndieReader.