As she shines a light on the systemic disenfranchisement of the patients she treats as they struggle to maintain their health and dignity, Harper comes to understand the importance of allowing ourselves to make peace with the past as we draw support from the present. How to understand that compassion isn’t the same as justice. How to tell the truth when it’s simpler to overlook it.
How to let go of fear even when the future is murky. Each of the patients Harper writes about taught her something important about recuperation and recovery. The Beauty in Breaking is the poignant true story of Harper’s journey toward self-healing. How we recognize those breaks, how we try to mend them, and where we go from there are all crucial parts of the healing process. In the ensuing years, as Harper learned to become an effective ER physician, bringing insight and empathy to every patient encounter, she came to understand that each of us is broken-physically, emotionally, psychically. Her marriage at an end, Harper began her new life in a new city, in a new job, as a newly single woman. They stayed together through medical school until two months before she was scheduled to join the staff of a hospital in central Philadelphia, when he told her he couldn’t move with her. Brought up in Washington, D.C., in a complicated family, she went to Harvard, where she met her husband. Michele Harper is a female, African American emergency room physician in a profession that is overwhelmingly male and white.
Bearing witness to human suffering day after day takes its physical and emotional toll, Harper admits, but, as a healer, she also considers “brokenness” to be “a remarkable gift.” In this time of heroic nurses fighting a pandemic, Harper allows readers to experience the healing process through her knowing eyes.An emergency room physician explores how a life of service to others taught her how to heal herself. (although one punctuated by violence), a marriage that fell apart, medical school, and a new city and fresh start-yet it is patients she focuses on: a newborn with no pulse a patient who, without warning, punches her in the face a young woman serving in the military in Afghanistan who was raped by her commanding officer. She recounts her life-a privileged upbringing in Washington, D.C. In this compelling, firsthand memoir, she offers a portrait of life on the medical frontlines as seen from a female and African American perspective. From the start, Harper claims that she has no special powers, nor does she know “how to handle death any better than you.” But as an ER physician, she certainly has confronted the grim reaper far more often than most.
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