The Emergency: A Year of Healing and Heartbreak in a Chicago ER by Thomas Fisher | 2022 | One World | Hardcover $27
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, 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. 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.
Disclosure statement: I received a digital ARC of this title from the publisher.
I wanted to read this book because the subject seemed relevant to my current work at an academic health sciences institution (a.k.a. med school + hospital + research labs). Researchers at my institution actually played a major role in the development of one of the coronavirus vaccines. Doctors and patients participated in clinical trials and tried experimental treatment plans. Students and new grads launched their careers by joining the battle against this new disease. Every single aspect of medical care was changed by the pandemic. Even those of us who don’t directly participate in patient care or lab work had to shift focus and try to accommodate or fight against this terrifying new reality.
But, as someone in this world but not on the frontlines of the fight, I need to continually seek the perspectives of people who are doing the actual fighting. If my job is to support our medical staff and researchers and students, I need to be aware of what they’re experiencing. That’s the perspective I hoped to find in this book. I found it. But also, this book is about so much more than the pandemic.
Dr. Thomas Fisher is an emergency room physician at an inner city hospital. The pandemic was (is) a disaster, true, but even before the pandemic, nearly every day was (… is) a kind of disaster in this author’s experience. The patients who showed up in his emergency room were regularly dealing with health problems that people in less disadvantaged neighborhoods rarely have to worry about — gunshot wounds, illnesses left untreated too long because medicine is impossible to afford or childcare is impossible to find, hours-long wait times to see a doctor for only a few minutes.
Our country’s healthcare system is a mess, and it’s the people in our poorest (and often historically racially ghettoized) places who suffer the most for that. This book is full of stories of these people, but it also contains empathetic contemplations in the form of letters to the author’s patients and colleagues on the state of healthcare in his community. This is not just the tale of a doctor dealing with a pandemic; it’s the tale of a doctor doing his best to fight health inequalities. He, like any human, sometimes fails, but he is still trying and trying again to care for his fellow humans and make this world a little better — if not for everyone all at once, at least for the particular patient sitting in front of him at that minute.
I wish I could say that this book is uplifting; it is, partly, but I also found it frankly rather bleak. I have low (and still sinking) confidence in a good future for our healthcare system, and have very little hope for the future of our society more generally; I can’t see how the problems highlighted in this book are ever going to get better. Still, it’s best to avoid becoming too demoralized to take any action at all and simply allowing despair to make this sad forecast into a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you, like me, struggle with this, try to take this collection of letters and stories as a reminder to vote, to donate if you can, and to amplify the voices of people who make it their lives’ work to make all of our lives better.
This is a worth-reading true story of continued hope and good work in the face of overwhelming systemic resistance; I definitely recommend it to anyone who wants to understand what medical professionals who are trying to serve our underserved communities have been dealing with, particularly during this global pandemic.
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Publication information: Fisher, Thomas. The emergency: A year of healing and heartbreak in a Chicago ER. New York, NY: One World, 2022. Ebook.
Source: ARC provided by publisher via Edelweiss.
Disclaimer: I am not compensated, monetarily or otherwise, for reviews of books or other products.