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Book details
  • Genre:FICTION
  • SubGenre:Medical
  • Language:English
  • Series title:Title in Mind
  • Series Number:1
  • Pages:258
  • eBook ISBN:9798350942682
  • Paperback ISBN:9798350942675

Explosive Paradise: From the Eyes of the Injured

Book One

by C. Schell

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Overview

This is a story of two sisters connected to the Explosive Paradise of Montserrat. One sister, Breta Gale, begins by collecting and organizing their letters. Her sister, Meta, begins by inserting Breta’s untitled poem. Through their letters, spanning between 1979 and 1999, Breta exercises her mind to help her memory. The story entwines Breta Gale’s traumatic brain injury with her sister Meta’s path of pain and recovery. Along the way, Meta finds romance and emerges from being a medical librarian to become a physician. The hope of this novel is to offer ideas about coping with pain and cognitive impairment without lecturing.

Description

This novel is a fictionalized true story of two sisters. It unfolds through letters they wrote between 1977 to 1999.  In Book One: Title In Mind, the reader learns both sisters sustained traumatic injuries from a near deadly accident that changes their lives. Breta Gale sustains traumatic brain injury with loss of her short-term memory while her older sister, Meta, suffers from multiple physical injuries. At first, the two sisters and their family lack insight into dealing with memory impairment and pain. Writing becomes a key avenue for their therapy. After being comatose, Breta awakes and struggles with no short-term memory, so living only in the present time. She organizes her world with sticky notes for labelling. Living in the world of NOW, her horse pulls her through mind turmoils while her sister Meta struggles with pain by writing, studying and mentally escaping her tortured physical body. Pain and curiosity steer Meta on an alternative career path from out of her sheltered library. Meta finds unexpected romance as she challenges her mind in medical school while Breta toils at labeling for hours each day to help her function. Her mind struggles to organize the letters, which lay the ground for the story, while Meta struggles with pain that moves her along as one of thousands of foreign medical student graduates. Those who cannot gain admission to U.S. medical schools or cannot afford them might opt for overseas education. Even for US citizens who graduate from any of the accredited foreign medical schools, the path of returning to train in the US is far from easy. First, during the years of this story, one had to graduate from an accredited World Health Organization medical school and then pass the ECFMG. The ECFMG (Exam Certification for Foreign Medical Graduates) certifies (FMGs) foreign medical graduates’ competency to enter a United States residency teaching program. The ECFMG is an opening step to be eligible for the more difficult and longer 3 day exam, the FLEX (Foreign License Exam). Second, to become a licensed physician, each state controls who sits and who passes the FLEX. At the time of this story in the early 1980s, Meta never expected to be one of some 400,000 foreign medical students. When asked how she went to medical school, Meta answers, a truck hit me. Breta and Meta were in the same vehicle accident through no fault of their own. Their life-threatening injuries happened when a drunk driver lost control of his truck. Breta and Meta endure through subsequent ordeals. What drives Meta is pain and curiosity about memory. Pain occupies her life. Pain pushes her. Meta turns to study to pull her mind away from torture. She finds romance when she is not looking for it. She elects a career path over one romance that tears her heart to pieces. Breta, in the meantime, battles with her memory to do activities of daily living. Meta wants to know more about helping her sister, and others with brain injury, as well as those tormented by pain. This is the journey of how two sisters struggle to function after trauma. Pain reins Meta while Breta Gale is stuck in the world of NOW.

About the author

I emerged from the library and information science profession earning an MS degree from Simmons College in Boston. After becoming a certified medical librarian, a traumatic accident changed my world and my profession into a journey I never anticipated. Pain became an incentive to write. Pain drove me on a path to become a foreign medical graduate on the volcanic island of Montserrat, British West Indies before it began erupting. Currently, I am a retired physician.

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