Between Expectations: Lessons from a Pediatric Residency

From Barnes & Noble

Megan Weir's penetrating memoir about her experiences in a pediatric residency reveals her specialty as an 80-hour-a-week blend of diagnostic challenges, communication hurdles, and unexpected rewards. Her deep commitment to her patients shines through in this touchingly candid account of her frequently humbling efforts to combine treatment with preventive medicine. Between Expectations doesn't attempt to overwhelm you with dramatic ER action or Gray's Anatomy rivalries; it just invites you into the very real and uncertain role of a practicing physician.

Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

“A searing, compassionate, well-written and inspiring account by a young woman doctor out on the leading edge of caring for children. A marvelous book.” —Samuel Shem, M.D., author of The Spirit of the Place and The House of God

Between Expectations is a beautifully written and profoundly personal account of learning the often strange and often sad realities that make up a doctor's life. Dr. Weir's humanity is impressive as she describes the vivid stories of her journey, and the patients who helped shape her as a doctor. — Perri Klass, MD, author of Treatment Kind and Fair: Letters to a Young Doctor

"In this intensely personal work, Meghan Weir has skillfully captured both the struggles and triumphs of residency training. She has pulled back the curtain to reveal a demanding world most readers will not have seen. Her honesty describing her own transformation from medical student to physician and in addressing issues often left unexplored is refreshing and moving. " —Lauren A. Smith, MD, MPH Associate Professor at the Boston University School of Medicine

"In this intensely personal work, Meghan Weir has skillfully captured both the struggles and triumphs of residency training. She has pulled back the curtain to reveal a demanding world most readers will not have seen. Her honesty describing her own transformation from medical student to physician and in addressing issues often left unexplored is refreshing and moving. " —Lauren A. Smith, MD, MPH Associate Professor at the Boston University School of Medicine

"It's a given that doctors-in-training will suffer through sleep deprivation and stress, but pediatrician Weir brings something more heartfelt—and joyful—to this achingly personal chronicle of her residency." —Publisher's Weekly

"Bound together by her luminously detailed and emotionally literate prose, Weir’s recollections compellingly portray the challenges and rewards of modern medicine, and the slow and stumbling process through which a physician is formed. " —[tk] reviews

Kirkus Reviews

An eviscerating chronicle of life as a pediatric resident in two dissimilar Boston hospitals.

It is not easy to like Weir at the beginning of the book. She does not deign to edit her responses to what were often dire circumstances, and she writes with greater deliberation than she displayed on the ward. On the page, she lets her emotions flow exactly as they did at any particular moment, informed by her education or anger about extremely difficult scenarios, such as the tiny premature baby with multiple complications whom she would have let go, his present and future so hopeless, but whose parents refused to surrender. Or the parents who "ask questions for the sake of asking them, to feel involved, much as children do when they are three or four." Or the teenagers, "with their propensity for sullenness and outright lies, their inability to state in any simple and straightforward terms what was bothering them and why they needed to see a doctor." Slowly, without making a show of it, Weir demonstrates that she is simply being fair to her understanding of each situation. She never gives any less than her best, but a resident's workload is impossibly punishing and the situations wretched. She not only gathers the medical talent that may cure a life-threatening problem, but she shows the ineffable will to push through the fugue states and existential despair, a misery testified by another resident during a review session: "It would have been helpful if someone had told us ahead of time that all the Onc kids were going to die." Readers will weep at points, but, without guile or fanfare, the author also presents many instances of tenderness.

As the cold certainty of heartbreak surrounds her, Weir's sharp honesty begets the doctor's best friend: trust.