A powerful, compelling firsthand account of the moral and ethical questions ER doctors face even as they scramble to diagnose patients on the brink of death. Code Gray is the riveting story of a seemingly healthy forty-three-year-old woman who arrives in the ER in sudden cardiac arrest. The cause of her condition is unknown, and as the ER team tries desperately to revive her, they cannot seem to find why her heart stopped. Eventually the cause is discovered--too late to save her--and it raises an unexpected ethical concern for Dr. Nahvi and the woman's husband. With this narrative as background, Dr. Nahvi shares other stories of moral and ethical challenges, among them an elderly woman and her adult daughter who each want to enlist him in a conspiracy to shield the other from knowledge of the mother's terminal cancer diagnosis. Dr. Nahvi worked in two of New York's most heavily impacted ER's in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. He describes the frantic exchange of information among the city's ER doctors as they collectively encountered an illness none of them had ever seen before. Ranging from the Covid outbreak to the perennial glaring inequities in healthcare that it highlighted, Code Gray is a beautifully written, heartfelt memoir that will appeal to readers of Atul Gawande and Siddhartha Mukherjee.
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A decent book adding to the ever growing list of emergency physicians and other medical folk pouring their experiences into the written form.
I enjoyed the read, though I also found a one hour prologue consisting almost entirely of text messages during the COVID era a little off-putting. It felt less like a story the author wanted to tell, and more like a scaring indictment of the American medical system. Which it deserves, but seemed terribly out of place in a book dedicated to the experiences of an ER doctor at work. This was not about the people who suffered from the first COVID wave but about the Trump administrations unwillingness to provide proper medical equipment to healthcare workers.
However once you get past this extended rant, it's a an emotionally challenging journey through a single day of an ER doctor's experience, touching on a great number of ethical and medical dilemmas and insights.
