Wardlife: The Apprenticeship of a Young Writer as a Hospital Clerk

For nine years Andrew Steinmetz worked as a ward clerk in the Intensive Care Unit and Emergency Department of a major hospital. Wardlife is a series of riveting prose vignettes--intensely observed moments drawn from diaries kept during the nine years he spent as a ward clerk. With character sketches, dialogues, and brief meditations on subjects ranging from the language of poetry to the language of medicine, Wardlife records the hospital experience--the pathos and pain, the humor and horror--of life on the wards. A profound and deeply sympathetic understanding of this unique environment is conveyed. Described are the feel of instruments, the tone of a locating girl's voice calling code blue, the oddly triumphant grieving of a family watching and singing at a dying father's bedside, and the complications of various hospital subcultures.