Despite multiple union alerts, it was covid that led to the emergence of the public hospital crisis. Behind the worrying figures, what is the reality? Let's walk together The road to the block to discover all the pitfalls of a young surgeon.
A surgeon's descent into hell
The bouldering route first follows a couple on holiday in Iceland. Despite splendid landscapes, Benjamin cannot detach himself from his work as a surgeon. He rehashes everything that makes his professional life impossible. At the end, he cracks in a restaurant. His companion, distraught, tries to understand how he arrived at this extreme level of stress. It is the scriptwriter, cartoonist and colorist Lisa Sanchis and this research will give the book La route du bloc edited by Delcourt.
As often in journalistic comics, the realistic purpose of La route du bloc is counterbalanced by a symbolic and rounded drawing. The décor and drawing are limited to the essentials. In the same way, the colorization is reduced to four colors as shown on the cover.
Different steps towards the road to the block…
At two years old, Benjamin sees a client suffering from a heart attack being rescued by the emergency room. This moment determines his life: he wants to work in health and then become a surgeon. This is the beginning of The Block Road. He trains to reproduce on dolls the words and gestures of doctors. He even writes a post-operative report. At a very young age, he visited a hospital and then did an internship in a pediatric department. Benjamin discovers the solidarity of the care team to endure the long days. There he is confronted with death.
During the twelve years of exhausting studies, Benjamin made a brilliant career because he passed the competition and went out in the best. These successes in day school and again in boarding school allow him to choose his services in Paris.
In La route du bloc, the reader realizes very well the mass of work provided by the internal. Like a scout, he prepares the patient and the operating room. He closes the convoy by making the balance sheet and the reimbursement file for the security.The training then goes through observation and companionship. You have to show yourself at every moment, stay humble and ask the right questions to hope to have an answer from the mandarins. Otherwise, it is the humiliation of heavy silence. We also enter the folklore of the hospital by visiting the guard room where the humor is rarely fine …
Despite the complexity of the job, the neophyte understands everything through drawing. The road of the block integrates multiple and diverse registers like a childhood document of Benjamin. Lisa Sanchis also plays with genres. It is sometimes literal when boarding school is a game of goose or a doctor Maboul. A parody of a diary tells of Benjamin's internship with a surgeon. Lisa Sanchis illustrates the hierarchy of public assistance by characters from the Star Wars saga
… before loss and fall 
By dint of passing the tests, Benjamin seems invulnerable and has been working 90 hours a week for two years. The shock of his burnout is even stronger. He cracks because of the endless working days where he combines his service and then the guards.
In the midst of the malaise of the public hospital, La route du bloc is an indictment of a universe that has become inhuman. It is illustrated on the back cover by a diabolical hopscotch who starts from the childhood vocation to the current burnout. The stations of hopscotch correspond to the chapter of the book. Benjamin, however, is not the ideal candidate for depression. Indeed, he received a sense of duty from his father as an officer in the air force.
However, Lisa Sanchis does not make surgeons heroes by showing the inhumanity of some.The public hospital forms a very pyramidal system of the head of department externally where the interns are corvéable at will. They do everything that doctors refuse but without any recognition. This hierarchy is regularly recalled to the lower strata.
In La route du bloc, Lisa Sanchis draws the portrait of her companion, from his vocation to his early years as a pediatric surgeon. The reader understands each technical term by the explanations using pop references that make accessible, with a smile, a beautiful and hard job. By closing the book the reader realizes the magnitude of the crisis of the public hospital.
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