This does read like an unedited notebook, impressions and experiences and the authors' emotional reaction to same are intimate and detailed. This also makes it feel disjointed. Also quite graphic, in a medical way, not for the faint of heart. As a nurse of twenty years experience I can relate significantly to the scenarios, although I can see why the author was not cut out for this. His compassion ran dry long before the short notebook was done. Having said that, there is plently of dark humor and hopelessness to be found in medicine as a whole. I consider myself blessed to have found a corner of the medical universe in which I find meaning and hope in my daily toil. And yes, I have wrestled on many occasion with God & the meaning of suffering. I have, however found a way to be at peace with it and know when to stop ruminating over questions I have no answer for (such as the death of a child). I have also worked, in the past, in situations that left me exhausted emotinally & physically and wanting nothing more than to run away and never return. ( )

Some of the scenes in this book were funny, in a dark humor kind of way, but many lack any type of context leaving them flat and void of meaning to the reader. Use of unexplained acronyms also makes it inaccessible to a reader without a medical background. I enjoyed a few of the pieces mostly pertaining to funny and unusual patients, but most weren't very entertaining. ( )

This story was rather bizarre and vulgar. The depressing vignettes illustrated suffering and death. It reminded me of the suffering that my grandmother and grandfather must have endured before succumbing to pancreatic and colon cancer. Sadly, some of the nurses and orderlies that took care of them were as miserable as Henry. This story was a little too depressing and dark for my taste. ( )

This is not a novel nor is it a straightforward historical account of somebody's working life, and the lack of supporting information makes it a difficult book to review.

Henry Fuckit is a hospital orderly and these are a record of his observations, thoughts, cynicism and outright depression at the sights, the sounds and the smells that he encounters on a daily basis. Having read this, I have no desire to be ill, old or disabled in any way, and the most depressing thing is that these are an inevitability for most of us. The strength of the book is its brevity; Henry records patients when they sicken him, irritate him or amuse him (but there is only the black humour of lost dignity, no belly laughs here), and the way he moves on tells you that Henry has no empathy, once dead they are not even a memory. He finds his fellow staff members just as uninspiring.

So what makes Henry so detached, so bored, so damn depressed? We'll never know because there is no background to this. We know nothing of his life, his reasons for doing what he does; his age, his ideals, his dreams or his future. Just his notes on the sick and the vulnerable and how they tick him off. Based on the authors own time spent as an orderly, one must hope that he himself is a little more humane than his character. ( )