Trauma Junkie: Memoirs of an Emergency Flight Nurse
by Janice Hudson
Category: Biography & Autobiography

Is there an afterlife? Janice Hudson, who's seen her share of death, ventures an assuring yes in this memoir about her years as a trauma nurse. In May 1987, newlywed intensive-care nurse Hudson was recruited to join a helicopter ambulance service and "fly out to accidents, scrape up the patients and try to get them to qualified care in that first 'golden hour, ' when they'd have the best chance for meaningful survival after traumatic injuries." Hudson hits on the usual suspects: barroom brawls, failed suicide attempts, and grisly car wrecks. She also recounts what are likely to be some of the more unusual cases, including a call from a woman who insisted that her mountaintop home was being overrun by an army of mountain lions (which turned out to be a single housecat, amplified thanks to the caller's diet of alcohol and crystal meth). Death is a constant in her pages, but so is Hudson's belief that something interesting awaits us afterward, as a few of her eerie anecdotes attest. -Amazon