The Emergency: A Year of Healing and Heartbreak in a Chicago ER

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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. As an emergency room doctor, 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, 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. In The Emergency, Fisher brings us through his shift, 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. To cope, 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 added perspective of policymaking experience, 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.

Reviews

This book reminds us how permanently interesting our bodies are, especially when they go wrong.Fishers account of his days is gripping. . . . His frustration, his outraged intelligence, is palpable on every page. . . . the best account Ive 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 Chicagos historically Black South Side. San Francisco Chronicle

The Emergency isgraphic and gut-wrenching,as it should be. It isan 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 scarringand often fatalwounds of inequality. The Emergency is a bat call. Health care doesnt care, inequality kills, and we must do better.Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, author of What the Eyes Dont See

The Emergency is a doctors-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 Dont make the mistake of missing the best book about it to date. The Emergency is Thomas Fishers memoir of the first year of the pandemics grip on Chicagos 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 buta gripping accountof events as they happen. Its 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 reflectionon an aphorism Fisher invokes: When America catches a cold, black America catches pneumonia.It wont take you long to read this fast-paced account, but you wont 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 . . . insiders report on a broken system.Kirkus Reviews

Author Bio

Thomas Fisher is a board-certified emergency medicine physician from Chicago. He has worked to improve health care as an academic, health insurance executive, and White House Fellow in the Obama administration. His path includes training as Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar, being honoured as a Crain's Chicago Business 40 under 40, and inclusion in the Aspen Institute's Health Innovators Fellowship. He is an epicure and a runner, and for the past twenty years he has worked in the emergency department at the University of Chicago, serving the same South Side community where he was raised.