This experience prompts Michele to reflect on the vulnerabilities of medical workers as well as when and how a patient like this should be held responsible for his actions. In the next chapter, Michele treats a patient who had previously assaulted a female doctor. The loss of this infant breaks open something inside of her and she recognizes openings as opportunities for healing. Michele is shaken by this loss and the possibility that she may never have a child of her own. During a night shift, Michele and her team are unable to resuscitate an infant who had suddenly and inexplicably stopped breathing at home. Instead, he ended their marriage, and Michele is left to rebuild her life alone in a new city. At the end of her medical residency, Michele had planned to move to Philadelphia with her husband. She wants to be of service to others through healing. While growing up with a physically abusive father, Michele decides to become a doctor and specifically want to work in emergency rooms. Like her patients, she has been broken but believes that there is something beautiful and worthy in the process of healing and rebirth. She has learned to cultivate stillness amid struggle, in part from her experience growing up with an abusive father, and knows that it is her job to find that stillness in the chaos of emergency medicine as she does everything she can to heal her patients and keep death at bay. Michele Harper is an emergency medicine doctor. The following version of the book was used to create this study guide: Harper, Michelle.
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