‘Not everything in medicine is rational. The universe itself tends towards chaos.”
How rare and satisfying it is to be drawn into a novel by the opening lines and to become immersed immediately in its protagonist and her world. Together On Our Own is such a novel for me.
The author, Dr. Eliana Megerman, is an emergency room physician who writes with graceful ease and guides us into the inner depths of a medical world which we usually see only from the surface. She masterfully connects psychological insights, philosophical reflections, and sensory descriptions.
The plot delves into critical points of conflict in the chaos of everyday life, the highs and lows of the emergency room, triaging patients, mysterious deaths, and the “fleeting and fragile nature of life.”
The story centers around Dr. Alex Galen, an emergency medicine resident who is struggling professionally and emotionally after the sudden, unexpected death of a patient. On probation, she agonizes and ruminates. What if she missed a diagnosis or misinterpreted an X-ray or forgot to administer a significant test?
She reminds us that “burnout and compassion fatigue are a natural part of medical training.” The reader can almost feel the overwhelming, crushing weight of this spiraling of anxiety, blame, guilt, and resentment, and the way it transforms, from their earliest training, the men and women who bear it.
Alex hesitantly turns to the hospital’s newly introduced artificial intelligence platform, and despite her skepticism about technology, she becomes increasingly dependent on it.
She exclaims, “How I longed for a non-judgmental outlet!”
For Alex, the AI becomes AI Henry, named after her colleague with whom we might want to see her connect romantically. As she strains under the pressure, the reader begins to think some AI support just might help in this case. One evening, Alex tells the AI she is going out with a friend although she really doesn’t feel like it, and the AI responds, “Why don’t you tell her that you’re with me?”
Gradually, the reader is pulled into this unravelling that Alex, reflecting contemporary society, is experiencing. But despite everything, Alex’s life is not completely boxed in by a dehumanizing medical system and a nonhuman intelligence.
Between medicine and humanity
There are real-life connections in the story: friendship, betrayal, redemption, and romance, marked along the way by origami notes, violin concertos, and blueberry pancakes. With the last of these, the author creatively turns the plot in conjunction with Alex’s loss of taste for one of her favorite foods.
Together On Our Own begins with Alex’s ruminations, reminiscences, and self-doubts, and moves into the high-pressure medical world that Alex lives in. After familiarizing us with that world, the plot shifts to a fast-moving mystery.
This makes it a story with two parallel narrative structures: a literary exploration of the human condition and a plot-driven suspense novel.
Both parts are characterized by affection and dark humor as the book deals with complex realities that are sometimes exceptional and sometimes familiar to each of us: the stressful, unpredictable demands of work; overreaching, unappreciative parents; siblings who love us but just cannot understand us; friends both supportive and toxic; and the human capacity to harm others, emotionally and physically, personally and impersonally.
Thought-provoking, Together On Our Own invites us to confront profound existential questions about essential elements of the human condition: loneliness, illness, mortality, and the constant hope of establishing loving, sustaining, and real-human connections.
Megerman writes, “Everyone wants to make sense of the world. To fit the unexpected, the difficult, and the unfair into a painting that seems carefully planned as opposed to splashed randomly at the canvas. But I now know that it is the rare life indeed where the paint stays in the borders and isn’t splattered in every direction.” ■
TOGETHER ON OUR OWN
By Eliana Megerman
EM Lit Press
264 pages; $11