Balance, Pedal, Breathe - Book Review

Balance, Pedal, Breathe: A Journey through Medical School by Claire Unis MD is an entertaining yet informative memoir that explores and illuminates the personal and professional difficulties physicians face through their calling. Dr. Unis provides an insight into dealing with personal tribulations while facing the long, tedious hours required to develop technical excellence in their craft and the litany of life-and-death decisions that a physician must make.

The author uses excerpts from her journal and her vast experience in her memoir of the “uniquely magnificent experiences” of becoming a doctor. She balances stories of her “before self” and her “doctor self” with visually gripping, descriptive sights, malodorous smells, nerve-grating noises, and patients’ stories. Medical terminology and jargon make the stories personal.

She tells of her desire as a young child to be a “helper” and her interest in medicine. Her trials and misgivings through the strenuous process of medical school and her difficult decision on a medical specialty are balanced with stories of her determination to continue with her interests in bicycling, rock climbing, hiking, and other outdoor activities. Later, during her clinical rotations, she takes up swing dancing. The author is masterful in relating the loneliness and exhaustion of medical training experiences to her extra-curricular activities.

Preparing to take the Medical Boards, she seriously considers whether or not she deserves to be a doctor. She has faced mortality first with cadavers, but how will she deal with her first death? She learns that doctors are “stoic students of disease and death.” During her clinical rotations, she is “doing and being and sensing and feeling” in real life. Several short yet intense rotations in surgery, psychiatry, labor and delivery, pediatrics, geriatrics, and other specialties, test her determination and dedication.

Most challenging are the destitute, extremely ill street people, usually alcoholics or drug users, that she treats in the emergency rooms. The horrific smells of unwashed bodies oozing sores and alive with lice repel her. She recalls attempting to jump her horse over an especially difficult obstacle and how she had to calm herself to be in control and not be thrown. She called on the same calming technique when approaching difficult patients. She also recalled advice that she should “touch them” in a loving, not clinical, way. She soon begins to relate to these “lost souls” as humans and help them medically.

Doctor Unis is an accomplished writer as well as a pediatrician. This memoir is a must-read for anyone who has a doctor-patient relationship. Understanding the challenges doctors endure will build and enhance the rapport. Balance, Pedal, Breathe elucidates and humanizes the difficult road traveled to becoming a physician.