For Sam Wyatt, his intern year was going to be the hardest year of his life. Profoundly affected by violence and death - and long before it was called PTSD or burnout - Sam and his fellow interns, Wilson Harrison, Gina Bautista, and Harry Martin must find a way to survive in THE COUNTY.
Doubting their choices, working 90 hours a week, lacking sleep, surviving on a diet of bad food and black coffee, each must learn to work in the understaffed, underfunded, and deteriorating hospital taking care of critically ill patients; for a system demanding they be constantly overworked if they want to become the doctors they promised themselves they would be.
Within this brutal system, Sam finds a mentor in Fish - his senior resident and the only one to tell him the actual rules to survive:
- Everyone will try to kill your patient, except you.
- It's OK to be wrong, but never unsure.
- Rebels are shot at dawn.
Fish should know. He had been through it just a year before. But would any of them make it out unscathed?
Set in the 1970's, this raw portrait of the birth of emergency medicine bears the roots of many of the problems underlying our broken medical system and our system of training doctors. Ones that have only progressively worsened since that time. But...
If you can persevere...
If you really follow Fish's rules...
Maybe you too can survive THE COUNTY.