You don’t want to talk about it.

Sensitive topic, that’s it. Brings up memories you don’t care to examine, things you aren’t willing to confront in your mind. No, what’s done is done, there’s no going back, and you don’t want to talk about it. At least not until, as in the new book “White Hot Light” by Frank Huyler, you do…

After more than two decades working in emergency medicine, you might think a doctor has seen it all. Done it all, maybe, but Frank Huyler still seems to be surprised at what the human body can endure or accommodate, and still support life.

He sometimes seems surprised at himself.

After that long in the ER, a doctor is seasoned. He makes fewer young-doctor mistakes, but the curiosity he once had still exists. He knows that the new crop of residents and interns are too young to have seen diseases that devastated populations a couple generations ago. He has confidence in his own reflexive actions when the job demands it, but even in the comfortable center of his career, he’ll never stop second-guessing or what-iffing.

Could he have saved the beautiful boy with skin marred by a small blue hole on the right side of his belly? The boy’s tender age reminded Huyler of his own son, bringing back memories of the night his boy was born. Or what about the son who’d been injured in war, and the father whose name Huyler never learned?

Was there any way to help the immigrant woman who couldn’t keep appointments, or the one who came in with cancer so advanced that he could see her bones? Or the thousand people brought back from overdoses — could they be saved? Or the suicidal, or those whose stories are learned from police or EMTs — or those whose stories he’d never learn? There were so many heart attacks he’s seen, so many last breaths, so many survivors left to mourn, which is where his experience steps in.

Experience puts a callus on a doctor’s pain. But it should never numb his reverence for life.

“White Hot Light” is not a pretty read. Not at all, but it’s a beautiful one.

If that sounds like a bit of a riddle to you, here: the stories that author Frank Huyler tells are gnashingly ragged, but the language he uses to tell them is breathtaking, in a soft-grass-and-rolling-hills sort of way. Devastating anecdotes, gorgeous prose.

Don’t let that scare you off, though, because this isn’t just a book on illness and death. Huyler also extends deep appreciation for colleagues here, and that’s tinged with frequent awe. He’s well-traveled and grew up overseas, so we peek through a window at places and practices we’ll likely never know. We see frailty that’s strangely comforting.

Indeed, this is a hard read, but you’ll be spellbound — especially if you’ve ever consulted an MD, or think you might some day. For you, doctors, nurses, or medical support staff, “White Hot Light” is a must-read you’ll want to talk about.

“White Hot Light: Twenty-Five Years in Emergency Medicine” by Frank Huyler
c.2020, Harper Perennial
$16.99 / $21.00 Canada
272 pages