The Emergency

A Year of Healing and Heartbreak in a Chicago ER

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March 22, 2022 | ISBN 9780593502389

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About the Book

The riveting, pulse-pounding story of a year in the life of an emergency room doctor trying to steer his patients and colleagues through a crushing pandemic and a violent summer, amidst a healthcare system that seems determined to leave them behind

“Gripping . . . eloquent . . . This book reminds us how permanently interesting our bodies are, especially when they go wrong.”—The New York Times
 
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time


As an emergency room doctor working on the rapid evaluation unit, Dr. Thomas Fisher has about three minutes to spend with the patients who come into the South Side of Chicago ward where he works before directing them to the next stage of their care. Bleeding: three minutes. Untreated wound that becomes life-threatening: three minutes. Kidney failure: three minutes. He examines his patients inside and out, touches their bodies, comforts and consoles them, and holds their hands on what is often the worst day of their lives. Like them, he grew up on the South Side; this is his community and he grinds day in and day out to heal them.
 
Through twenty years of clinical practice, time as a White House fellow, and work as a healthcare entrepreneur, Dr. Fisher has seen firsthand how our country’s healthcare system can reflect the worst of society: treating the poor as expendable in order to provide top-notch care to a few. In The Emergency, Fisher brings us through his shift, as he works with limited time and resources to treat incoming patients. And when he goes home, he remains haunted by what he sees throughout his day. The brutal wait times, the disconnect between hospital executives and policymakers and the people they're supposed to serve, and the inaccessible solutions that could help his patients. To cope with the relentless onslaught exacerbated by the pandemic, Fisher begins writing letters to patients and colleagues—letters he will never send—explaining it all to them as best he can.
 
As fast-paced as an ER shift, The Emergency has all the elements that make doctors’ stories so compelling—the high stakes, the fascinating science and practice of medicine, the deep and fraught interactions between patients and doctors, the persistent contemplation of mortality. And, with the rare dual perspective of somebody who also has his hands deep in policy work, Fisher connects these human stories to the sometimes-cruel machinery of care. Beautifully written, vulnerable and deeply empathetic, The Emergency is a call for reform that offers a fresh vision of health care as a foundation of social justice.
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Praise for The Emergency

“This book reminds us how permanently interesting our bodies are, especially when they go wrong. Fisher’s account of his days is gripping. . . . His frustration, his outraged intelligence, is palpable on every page. . . . the best account I’ve read about working in a busy hospital during Covid.” The New York Times

“A briskly paced, heartfelt, often harrowing year in the life of an ER doctor on Chicago’s historically Black South Side.” San Francisco Chronicle

The Emergency is graphic and gut-wrenching, as it should be. It is an undeniable call for a just health-care system, as it will be.”—Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist

“With scalpel-like precision and searing patient stories, Thomas Fisher exposes the battlefield of medicine and the scarring—and often fatal—wounds of inequality. The Emergency is a bat call. Health care doesn’t care, inequality kills, and we must do better.”—Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, author of What the Eyes Don’t See

The Emergency is a doctor’s-eye view of the layered crises afflicting a single Chicago community and the entire nation that surrounds it. By turns brutal and beautiful, this is a tale of life, death, and the people whose efforts often determine which of those two will prevail.”—Jelani Cobb, co-editor of The Matter of Black Lives

“Tired of reading about COVID-19? Don’t make the mistake of missing the best book about it to date. The Emergency is Thomas Fisher’s memoir of the first year of the pandemic’s grip on Chicago’s South Side, where he grew up and where he battled the disease, along with every other ailment and injury that reached his emergency room. This is no past-tense memoir but a gripping account of events as they happen. It’s beautifully rendered in the present tense and leavened by a series of letters he composed to, and in honor of, his patients. But this is also a book about our country, a wrenching and tender reflection on an aphorism Fisher invokes: When America catches a cold, black America catches pneumonia. It won’t take you long to read this fast-paced account, but you won’t forget it anytime soon.”—Paul Farmer, M.D., author of Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor

“Riveting . . . [Fisher] eloquently captures the intensity of the situation . . . and shares heartrending stories of victims. . . . The result is a powerful reckoning with racial injustice and a moving portrait of everyday heroism.”Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Dramatic . . . well written and compassionate . . . a persuasive, sympathetic . . . insider’s report on a broken system.”Kirkus Reviews
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Excerpt

The Emergency

I

February 2020

We had been waiting for the virus to appear in our ER, but when it did, a heavy pall still fell on the department. Unmasked nurses with long faces spoke in hushed voices and laughed nervously as the patient was directed to Room 41, a negative pressure room that had been designed in 2015 to contain Ebola. The negative pressure in the room keeps the patient’s air from contaminating the rest of the department, and the room has a window and microphone in the wall so that we can communicate with the patient while remaining safe outside. Before I entered the antechamber between the common ER hall and the room, I put on a yellow gown, an N95 mask shaped like a duckbill, and a disposable plastic eye shield that I placed over my glasses. The nurse, Fred, was similarly protected, and together we leapt from the safety of the boat into the dark abyss.

I first met the leviathan on New Year’s Eve less than two months earlier. “China investigates outbreak of atypical pneumonia that is suspected linked to SARS,” tweeted Agence France-­Presse on the morning of December 31, 2019. At the time, I had been following foreign media for human signs of the flu that was culling a third of Asia’s hogs. But this was not swine flu. Rapidly spreading and deadly infections threaten everyone who works in emergency rooms. We fear the day that a panicked traveler shows up with a high fever and an unusual rash. In the time that it takes to figure out what’s going on they would be able to infect all the nurses and doctors who try to help. That nightmare keeps me vigilant for deadly viruses and outbreaks of hemorrhagic fevers no matter where they are on the globe, but so far, I had only experienced misses.

In 2001, when anthrax spores were mailed to politicians and journalists, our waiting room filled with healthy patients worried that they had been exposed to a “white powder.” Thirteen years later Ebola swept the world, and I drilled donning and doffing head-­to-­toe protective equipment for the seemingly inevitable febrile patient bleeding from their eyes and nose. As this unusual pneumonia bloomed into tens, then hundreds of cases, my curiosity turned into something else: fear. When The New York Times took note in a January 8, 2020, article nestled deep within the global health section, I forwarded the item to friends along with a caveat: “This may not be a looming pandemic, but when the next one occurs, this is how it will start.”

All of January and most of February elapsed before the first symptomatic patient arrived on the South Side, where I worked as an emergency room doctor at the University of Chicago. By then the coronavirus was dubbed COVID-­19 and had infected people on every continent. At last, in late February, a febrile traveler named Terri came to us with a cough and a story. A flight attendant had coughed in her face on her way to Seattle, a city already besieged by the virus. As Seattle’s ICUs swelled with infected people, Terri, a middle-­aged businesswoman, shook hands in meetings and dined with clients. On the flight back she broke into a fever and developed a hacking cough. After googling “best hospital in Chicago,” she grabbed a cab from Midway and came directly to our Emergency Department.

Terri coughed behind her blue surgical mask but greeted Fred and me in good spirits. Dwarfed by the proportions of Room 41, a room designed to accommodate a dialysis machine and a ventilator, she lay semi-­reclined, red-­faced and sweaty on the gurney. As she was complaining of body aches and nausea, I made a call to the hospital epidemiologist and ordered tests for the virus, a chest CT, and an admission to the hospital to keep her isolated until we confirmed her illness.

Terri’s vital signs remained stable despite a fever that Tylenol did not break. I could hear her cough through the closed double doors on her room—­each time, my shoulders tensed. We tested our infection precautions every year, but even so, Fred forgot to take off his protective wear when he returned to the ER from the murky depths of Room 41. While he was sending blood to the lab for tests, Fred left the isolation room door open, setting off a squealing alarm. Sweating and nervous, he apologized repeatedly for these miscues. I told him that it was okay, but we both knew these social graces were meaningless. The virus doesn’t care about our apologies or forgiveness. Diagnosing and treating an illness we’d never seen before while keeping our lungs and mucus membranes safe was going to require vigilance and stamina.

A week later, Americans awoke to a society unraveling in the wake of the monster’s cross-­country frenzy. As the infection spread, businesses reduced hours, then closed altogether and laid off workers. On March 9 the stock market crashed. Deaths mounted from one to tens to a hundred. I canceled my boys’ trip to Vegas for March Madness. Our country’s retreat progressed from there. An NBA player tested positive; the NBA abandoned its season; then all sports seasons were terminated. Chicago Public Schools had fought to extend their year after a fall strike, but it soon sent kids home indefinitely. Drunk young people, slurring their speech and draped over one another, spread the infection over St. Patrick’s Day and pushed our governor to close bars and restaurants and prohibit all nonessential travel. By then the virus’s campaign had gripped the world’s economy, culture, and routines. Seattle nursing homes had been wiped clean; in Italy refrigerator trucks filled with bodies; my colleagues in New York were exhausted—­and infected.

Friends across the country reached out for my advice on when to take their kids out of school or whether to take their planned vacation to Jamaica. I couldn’t make those decisions, but I did share my understanding of the situation and its risks. I directly addressed the misinformation emanating from Facebook and the White House—­I told them that this would not quickly disappear and that it was not a hoax. Each time my friends asked how many people would die, I considered withholding information from the models that forecast millions of dead Americans. While that would have been soothing, obscuring key information from those I care about undermines lifesaving decisions. Offering that the equivalent of Denver could die in a matter of months stuck in my throat. Sometimes we had to end the call.

Then the plague closed in on me from another direction. On March 23 my uncle fell ill, and three days later he was admitted to the intensive care unit. Uncle Robert was the one who took me to Tigers baseball games and rode bikes with me when I was a kid. In retirement from teaching in the Detroit Public Schools, he developed a chronic illness and landed in a care facility that didn’t protect him. Like millions of other Americans who’d been warehoused or discarded—­seniors, prisoners, migrant workers in airless camps—­people who society preferred to keep out of sight, the virus fell on those bodies hard. Uncle Robert was lucky—­after a few days of gasping in the ICU, he recovered. And then it came for the South Side.

COVID smashed through the South Side’s multigenerational homes. This is a neighborhood packed with people who didn’t have the sort of white-­collar jobs that let you work from home—­with nothing but a frayed safety net to hold them if they fell, they had to risk their bodies just to keep from starving. And when they came home, they exposed the vulnerable elders who often lived with them. The devastation was a literal manifestation of the old truism “When America catches a cold, Black America gets pneumonia.”

Even back in January, I knew that the onslaught was inevitable. No matter how I prepared, I expected to be infected before it was over. Scores of physicians around the world had already died. As their lungs became stiff and wet, they were attended by peers rendered unrecognizable by protective garments. Li Wenliang, the thirty-­four-­year-­old Wuhan doctor who alerted the world to the monster, was one of the first to die. A man about my age, facing down the pandemic just as I will, was lost in its wake. When I read about Li’s death, it strangely brought me back to 1999 and the killing of Robert Russ. I hadn’t thought about the story in years. Russ was around my age and was just about to graduate from Northwestern when a Chicago police officer shot him dead in a police stop. I didn’t know Russ; I’d only read about him in the newspaper, just as I was now reading about Li. But there were similarities in our lives that chilled me as I read his story: at the time we were both college-­age Black men who faced traffic stops from the same police department. In both cases Russ and Li were innocent, both lost to a lethal scourge that strikes down victims who share a portion of their identity. Just as in 1999, I now searched for the balance between fear of death, anger at the unfairness, and comfort in the long odds.

The only question I had was: how sick will I become? The only certainty is that once I’m infected, I will be contagious, and I can’t risk passing the disease along to my family, my patients, or the woman I think I love. So the terrifying months ahead will be spent mostly alone. It feels cruel that I will be without human touch during the most stressful time of my life, but the alternative is to infect the people who mean the most to me.

About the Author

Thomas Fisher
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About the Author

Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years In Power and Between The World And Me, which won the National Book Award in 2015. He is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. More by Ta-Nehisi Coates
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