Life on the Ground Floor
Letters from the Edge of Emergency Medicine
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Narrated by:
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Dr. James Maskalyk
About this listen
Canada Reads 2019 Longlist.
Winner of the 2017 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.
Do no harm is our most important rule, but we break it all the time trying to do good.
In this deeply personal book, winner of the 2017 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction, humanitarian doctor and activist James Maskalyk reflects upon his extensive experience in emergency medicine. Splitting his time between a trauma centre in Toronto's inner city and the largest teaching hospital in Addis Ababa, he discovers that though the cultures, resources and medical challenges of the hospitals may differ, they are linked indelibly by the ground floor: the location of their emergency rooms. Here, on the ground floor, is where Maskalyk confronts his fears and doubts about medicine, and witnesses our mourning and laughter, tragedies and hopes, the frailty of being and the resilience of the human spirit.
Yet, he is swept most intimately into this story of "human aliveness" not as a physician, but as a grandson carrying for his grandfather, now in his 90s.
Masterfully written and artfully structured, Life on the Ground Floor is more than just an emergency doctor's memoir - it's a meditation on health and sickness, on when to hang on tight, and when to let go.
©2017 James Maskalyk (P)2018 Doubleday CanadaListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"The problem with memoirs, especially when they are written by Western doctors heading off to Africa for work, is they can be self-indulgent and messianic in tone. Dr. James Maskalyk deftly avoids that trap in his highly acclaimed first book, Six Months in Sudan...[and] he's done so again in his new memoir, Life on the Ground Floor.... [His] idealism and passion are obvious...but the strength of the book is that it captures the viscera, real and symbolic, of the ER - its sights, sounds, smells, pulse - without romanticizing the work.... Ultimately, that's what the book is about - making connections, across continents, culture and social classes, and clinging to the joyful moments that can be found amid the horror." (The Globe and Mail)
"A master of the medical memoir...Dr. James Maskalyk has a remarkable talent for description and detail.... [He] is entrancingly interesting...and his talent is offering serial nuggets of insight into things we rarely consider.... What makes Maskalyk so [listenable]? He is a noticer of small things, a person on whom nothing is lost." (Toronto Star)
"With his moving and penetrating account of his experiences as an emergency room doctor in hospitals from Toronto to Ethiopia, Maskalyk joined a centuries-old tradition of doctors who write well." (Maclean's)
"Austere as the Sudanese landscape, plangent as a ballad, this book has poetry in it along with pain." (The Washington Post)
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Story
Building on the tradition of Little Bee, Chris Cleave again writes with elegance, humor, and passion about friendship, marriage, parenthood, tragedy, and redemption. Gold is the story of Zoe and Kate, world-class athletes who have been friends and rivals since their first day of Elite training. They've loved, fought, betrayed, forgiven, consoled, gloried, and grown up together. Now on the eve of London 2012, their last Olympics, both women will be tested to their physical and emotional limits.
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Very Good--but not great--
- By Patricia on 07-18-12
By: Chris Cleave
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Near Death
- A Thriller
- By: Glenn Cooper
- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman
- Length: 11 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Milan, Italy, today. It is the most serious crisis that the world has ever faced. Bewildered, young and old, believers and atheists are asking all the same distressing questions: What will they do now that the greatest dream of humanity has turned into a nightmare? What will happen when the countdown clock winds to zero?
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Not quite dead...yet
- By Matthew on 11-24-15
By: Glenn Cooper
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Ask Me Why I Hurt
- The Kids Nobody Wants and the Doctor Who Heals Them
- By: Randy Christensen M.D., Rene Denfeld
- Narrated by: Johnny Heller
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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The unforgettable inspiring memoir of one extraordinary doctor who is saving lives in a most unconventional way, Ask Me Why I Hurt is the touching and revealing first-person account of the remarkable work of Dr. Randy Christensen. Trained as a pediatrician, he works not in a typical hospital setting but, rather, in a 38-foot Winnebago that has been refitted as a doctor's office on wheels. His patients are the city's homeless adolescents and children.
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The reality of our streets
- By SusanInTheMidwest on 08-26-17
By: Randy Christensen M.D., and others
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The Silent History
- By: Eli Horowitz, Matthew Derby, Kevin Moffett
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman, LJ Ganser
- Length: 14 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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It begins as a statistical oddity: a spike in children born with acute speech delays. Physically normal in every way, these children never speak and do not respond to speech; they don't learn to read, don't learn to write. As the number of cases grows to an epidemic level, theories spread. Maybe it's related to a popular antidepressant; maybe it's environmental. Or maybe these children have special skills all their own.
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A Thought-Provoking Premise
- By Doug - Audible on 03-31-15
By: Eli Horowitz, and others
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A Heartbeat Away
- A Novel
- By: Harry Kraus
- Narrated by: Renee Ertl
- Length: 9 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Dr. Tori Taylor rules the operating room with a cold precision that makes nurses cower and her colleagues take notes. But even with her success as a respected surgeon, Tori finds herself alone in her moment of desperation - dying on her own operating table. Tori needs a heart transplant, but what she receives is far more than just a donor organ. Lying loveless and friendless in the recovery room, Tori experiences flashes of terrifying events she never witnessed.
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Many Layered Story of Faith and Healing
- By Debbie on 04-06-15
By: Harry Kraus
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The Devil in Silver
- By: Victor LaValle
- Narrated by: Victor LaValle
- Length: 13 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Pepper is a rambunctious big man, and, suddenly, the surprised inmate of a budget-strapped mental institution in Queens, New York. He's not mentally ill, but that doesn't seem to matter. On his first night, he's visited by a terrifying creature who nearly kills him before being hustled away by the hospital staff. It's no delusion: The other patients confirm that a hungry devil roams the hallways when the sun goes down. Pepper rallies three other inmates in a plot to fight back: Dorry, an octogenarian schizophrenic; Coffee, an African immigrant with severe OCD; and Loochie, a bipolar teenage girl.
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Not a horror/thriller
- By Matilda Luk on 03-17-18
By: Victor LaValle
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Pandemonium
- By: Daryl Gregory
- Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
- Length: 10 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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It is a world like our own in every respect, save one. In the 1950s, random acts of possession begin to occur. Ordinary men, women, and children are the targets of entities that seem to spring from the depths of the collective unconscious, pop-cultural avatars some call demons. As a boy, Del Pierce is possessed by the Hellion, an entity whose mischief-making can be deadly. With the help of Del's family and a caring psychiatrist, the demon is exorcised... or is it?
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Random demonic possession
- By Michael G Kurilla on 11-17-24
By: Daryl Gregory
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Bone Dry
- By: Bette Golden Lamb
- Narrated by: Beth Richmond
- Length: 7 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Imagine. You have cancer. You’ve been blasted and wasted with chemotherapy, along with every other poison the doctors could find to kill malignant cells. Most days you’re more dead than alive. Now there is one last chance for survival. Tomorrow you will be infused with your own, treated bone marrow frozen, stored, and safe in one of California’s most prestigious hospitals. Then comes the note: “We have your marrow.... pay or die."
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Not bad, not great, it was OK"
- By Laurie Carroll on 03-13-16
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Orphan Number Eight
- A Novel
- By: Kim van Alkemade
- Narrated by: Andi Arndt, Ginny Auer
- Length: 11 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In 1919, Rachel Rabinowitz is a vivacious four-year-old living with her family in a crowded tenement on New York City's Lower East Side. When tragedy strikes, Rachel is separated from her brother, Sam, and sent to a Jewish orphanage where Dr. Mildred Solomon is conducting medical research. Subjected to X-ray treatments that leave her disfigured, Rachel suffers years of cruel harassment from the other orphans.
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Stopped after a few hours
- By Tamara on 01-03-20
By: Kim van Alkemade
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Zac and Mia
- By: A.J. Betts
- Narrated by: Kristin Condon, Nick Mondelli
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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”When I was little I believed in Jesus and Santa, spontaneous combustion, and the Loch Ness Monster. Now I believe in science, statistics, and antibiotics.” So says 17-year-old Zac Meier during a long, grueling leukemia treatment in Perth, Australia. A loud blast of Lady Gaga alerts him to the presence of Mia, the angry, not-at-all-stoic cancer patient in the room next door. Once released, the two near-strangers can't forget each other, even as they desperately try to resume normal lives.
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Cute story
- By Caitlin E. on 08-11-19
By: A.J. Betts
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Zombies: More Recent Dead
- By: Neil Gaiman, Carrie Vaughn, Caitlin R. Kiernan, and others
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt, Marguerite Gavin
- Length: 20 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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The living dead are more alive than ever! Zombies have become more than an iconic monster for the 21st century: They are now a phenomenon constantly revealing as much about ourselves - and our fascination with death, resurrection, and survival - as our love for the supernatural or post-apocalyptic speculation. Our most imaginative literary minds have been devoured by these incredible creatures and produced exciting, insightful, and unflinching new works of zombie fiction.
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A well blended mix
- By The Lone Mopper on 07-30-15
By: Neil Gaiman, and others
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White Hot Light
- Twenty-Five Years in Emergency Medicine
- By: Frank Huyler
- Narrated by: Gary Bennett
- Length: 6 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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In the late 1990s, a young physician in Albuquerque, New Mexico, published a stunning memoir of his experiences in the highly charged world of the ER. Presented in a series of powerful, poetic vignettes, The Blood of Strangers became an instant classic. Now, over two decades later, Dr. Frank Huyler delivers another dispatch from the trenches—this time from the perspective of middle age. In portraits visceral, haunting, sometimes surreal, Huyler reveals the gritty reality of medicine practiced on the razor’s edge between life and death.
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Even Better than The Blood of Strangers
- By Elizabeth Darcy on 10-14-20
By: Frank Huyler
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Here After
- By: Sean Costello
- Narrated by: Timothy McKean
- Length: 9 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Following the death of his 10-year-old son, physician Peter Croft embarks on a desperate, seemingly random search for a missing child, risking his sanity, even his life in a grief-induced quest. His journey propels him into the darkest reaches of human suffering and pits him squarely against an adversary whose own obsession defies all reason.
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This one will really stick with you
- By Matthew on 04-13-16
By: Sean Costello
What listeners say about Life on the Ground Floor
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Dorothy
- 11-11-24
The author’s sincerity
Well written, well performed musings on the life of an emergency room MD in Ethiopia and Toronto.
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