The Emergency: A Year of Healing and Heartbreak in a Chicago ER
By
María Inés Zamudio
Reporter
Dr. Thomas Fisher’s memoir, “The Emergency: A Year of Healing and Heartbreak in a Chicago ER,” offers a firsthand critique of the country’s unequal healthcare system.
The Chicago South Side native has been an emergency room doctor at the University of Chicago Medical Center for two decades. Thomas' vivid account of the early days of Covid-19 is haunting. Caring for his community then was terrifying, he writes, “standing near unmasked COVID patients feels like being in the room with someone holding a gun.”
Fisher’s gripping account of the day-to-day triage in the ER is frustrating. He writes, “doctors like me are often pushed into unbearable struggles with moral and ethical dilemmas that flow from administrative and financial realities that demand concessions in our values.”
The frustration is personal. In his book, Fisher wrote about an experience that deeply influenced him: Fisher was 9 years old when Ben Wilson, the best high school basketball player in the country, was shot. Wilson was taken to a hospital where he waited hours for surgery. The experience stayed with Dr. Fisher because he grew up close to Wilson with a similar background – professional parents and “sheltered from the streets,” and it became the first time Dr. Fisher was touched by violence.
Years later, Fisher wonders whether Wilson would have survived if he had been taken to a better resourced hospital a few blocks away. “My calling is to take care of people like Benji…folks struck by healthcare emergencies in the same community that pushed and shaped me.”
Fisher invites the reader to sit with his reality and what it can tell us about the healthcare system.
“The emergency department is a place where we see this unvarnished truth,” he writes. “Healthcare workers like my colleagues and me care for those whose bodies reveal America’s broken promises.”
Vejam no link outra resenha (chamada destacada abaixo) do mesmo livro.
"An E.R. Memoir Conveys Hectic Work, Empathy and Outrage
In “The Emergency,” Thomas Fisher writes about his work at a Chicago hospital and the inequities of American health care."
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