On July 12, 1980, my life took a turn that led me to this career in hyperbaric medicine. I was 3
weeks into a general surgery training program, a lifelong dream, at the University of Colorado,
Denver, when I was run over by a car and severely injured. I never finished my general surgery
training.
The educational journey I would have travelled has now been told in a book by my younger
brother, who entered one of the most grueling general surgery training programs in the world at
the revered Los Angeles County-USC Hospital. This is his true story, the story of a generation
of the most skilled general surgeons trained under conditions and by a methodology that will
never be seen again.
It is about one of the most challenging fields in medicine, about maintaining one’s humanity and
humility through a five-year gauntlet of patients at the extremes of human misbehavior.
Dr Paul Harch’s brother Dr John Harch MD, retired surgeon wrote the book “Red Blanket”
