The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly

February 23, 2015
McCarthy follows his controversial tell-all about his brief baseball career, Odd Man Out, with an account of his grueling first-year internship at one of New York’s premier hospitals. Here, the New York-Presbyterian Hospital attending doctor is hardest on himself: he expresses guilt over a missed diagnosis with his first patient, coldly brought to his attention by the patient’s angry primary doctor, and learns a sobering lesson about the doctor-patient relationship from a patient awaiting a heart transplant. Along the way, he is guided by others, such as the second-year resident who gives him the tough love and experience required to make it through a rotation in the Cardiac Care Unit, the “real doctor” at the hospital’s clinic who helps him make independent—though not always perfect—decisions, and the physician who teaches him that through medicine “it is possible to reach the unreachable.” McCarthy’s story is one of transformation. “I felt different now because I was different,” he writes. “I was looking out for my patients, not myself.” McCarthy’s growth will seem familiar to everyone traveling a path of self-discovery. Agent: Scott Waxman, Waxman Leavell Literary Agency

March 1, 2015
The teeth-grinding, fidgety narrator of this rousing memoir describes his tumultuous year of medical internship at Columbia University Medical Center in New York, a 12-month marathon noteworthy for a steep learning curve, emotional extremes, and chronic sleep deprivation. Bombarded by a surplus of sick patients, a pager that rarely quits buzzing, hundreds of necessary little daily tasks, and a deluge of facts to remember, the newly minted Dr. McCarthy is overwhelmed and anxious, empathic and resilient. The poignant stories of patients are preserved in his memory: a good-natured guy waiting for a heart transplant and a young woman who ingested 16 bags of heroin. He fondly recalls fellow interns, role-model residents, and mentors. He becomes adept at resuscitating people who have suffered cardiac arrest, and he accidentally pokes his index finger with a needle contaminated by blood from a man with HIV. Although worn down and burned out during his first year of internal-medicine training, McCarthy morphs into a confident and competent physician: knowledgeable, skilled, and emotionally connected to patients. A genuine glimpse at the making of a doctor.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

November 15, 2014

Author of the best-selling Odd Man Out: A Year on the Mound with a Minor League Misfit, Harvard Medical School grad McCarthy delivers a sometimes raucous, sometimes moving story of his year as an intern at a New York hospital. Between nearly losing a patient the first day and befriending a man awaiting a new heart, McCarthy learned what it's like to deal with real patients instead of just textbooks, formulas, and cadavers.

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