She plays dual roles in the recounting a patient spiraling towards death and an omniscient critical care doctor and narrator. One of the aspects that makes her recounting of the tale so harrowing is the amazing degree of awareness that Awdish brings to the narrative. Her husband, Randy (major hero) races her to the hospital after Awdish calculates that being able to direct herself to her own hospital is more important than calling an ambulance.
This ordinary day is upset initially by cloudy thinking and loss of concentration, then by severe, breath taking, short lived spasms of pain that progress to severe unremitting pain, which leads to uncontrolled emesis.
Repeatedly Awdish is diverted into describing interesting observations she ha about the world and she weaves them effortlessly into the narrative in a compelling way. Her digression into the banality of describing the ordinariness of the days what I loved about the book. The absence of any premonitory clues, where we’ve been conditioned by Hollywood and literature to expect foreshadowing, leaves us feeling somehow cheated of a chance to anticipate the outcome. The cloudless, clear blue of the fall sky the day of the plane crash. The peaceful calm of the water the day of the drowning. When they reflect upon the subsequent life-changing events of any one day, they inevitably comment on how bland and unremarkable the day had been up until that moment. It was an entirely ordinary day.” I hear this often from patients or families, the survivors of devastating illness or tragedy. She begins the description of the day by remarking the ordinaryness of how it started: She recounts beat by beat how a normal day progresses to her (near) death from hemorrhagic shock. I have read a lot of doctor and medical books but Rana Awdish opening to In Shock is the most harrowing medical experience I have ever read.
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