The Emergency

October 1, 2021

A board-certified emergency medicine physician at the University of Chicago, Fisher grew up in a family of community-oriented doctors on Chicago's South Side. He studied public health at Dartmouth and Harvard before getting his medical degree at the University of Chicago Medical School, and his professional focus has always been on the damage done to underserved and particularly Black communities owing to disparities in health care. Throughout his career, he has always maintained an emergency-room rotation, and here he offers his views on public health from the perspective of the ER in times of COVID-19.

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Starred review from January 3, 2022
In this riveting debut memoir, Fisher, an emergency room doctor at the University of Chicago Medical Center in the city’s South Side, recounts his experiences during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic. Starting in February 2020, he documents daily life in the hospital during the initial surge of Covid-19 cases, offering fascinating details about abrupt changes in visitation policies, the complex process of donning and removing personal protective equipment, and how medical personnel dealt with short supplies of inhalers and other medical devices. In addition to tending to Covid-19 patients, Fisher treated victims of the South Side’s notorious gun violence. Throughout, he eloquently captures the intensity of the situation—“Standing near unmasked COVID patients,” he writes, “feels like being in the room with someone holding a gun”—and shares heartrending stories of victims, including a healthy 32-year-old woman who suffered a stroke as a result of the virus. In letters addressed to patients and family members, Fisher also reflects on growing up on the South Side in the 1980s and how the shooting death of a Black high school basketball star helped inspire his medical career, as well as spotlighting systemic racism within the U.S. health care system. The result is a powerful reckoning with racial injustice and a moving portrait of everyday heroism. Agent: Gloria Loomis, Watkins Loomis Agency.

February 1, 2022
A memoir from an emergency department doctor on Chicago's South Side. Fisher, who graduated from medical school in 2001, started working as an attending physician in the University of Chicago Medical Center in 2006. Beginning his first book with a dramatic account of how the emergency room faced its first Covid-19 cases in February 2020, he moves back and forth through time, alternating between tightly focused sections on the cases he sees on a given day and letters ostensibly directed toward some of those patients and others. The author's discussions of the initial impact of Covid-19, which "smashed through the South Side's multi-generational homes" and where standing near unmasked patients left him feeling "like being in the same room with someone holding a gun," are the most compelling. But the book, clearly started before the pandemic, is not so much about the effects of the pandemic--when the emergency department was less busy than usual (due to "social distancing orders and fear" of the virus), populated mainly by the victims of gun violence or drug overdoses--but rather the inadequacies of health care for Black citizens in the South Side and other urban areas. In the chapters about particular days in the emergency room, Fisher delivers sharp portraits of individual patients. However, like the doctor who treated them, typically only for a few minutes, we have no idea what happens to them following the visit. The essays between these chapters of reportage chronicle the author's life and his frequent frustration with a medical system that cares more about making money than caring for patients, especially those on Medicare. His indictments of the system are consistently convincing, but framing them as letters to patients is an awkward literary device, making the narrative disjointed. Nonetheless, the text is well written and compassionate and exposes countless problems within the American medical machine. Ta-Nehisi Coates provides the foreword. A persuasive, sympathetic, scattered insider's report on a broken system.

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February 1, 2022
""The pace of misery never relents. The volume of illness never slacks. The depths of despair never become routine."" That's how ER physician Fisher starkly depicts the emergency department he toils in. A paradoxical place where lives are saved and lost, where the magnitude of both human tenacity and human frailty are obvious. He recounts intense experiences treating all kinds of people and problems, shares his deep affection for the South Side of Chicago, and exposes the trouble with health care, especially high costs and racial inequities. Beginning in early 2020, his job and life are altered by the ever-present threat of COVID-19. ""Doctors are accustomed to the possibility of looming death when we go to work, but usually not our own,"" he writes. When Fisher starts a shift, there may be more than 40 patients waiting to be seen. Regrettably, he often must limit his patient interactions to a mere three minutes. Sprinkled throughout his account of plugging away in the ER are letters he writes to patients and colleagues, presumably undelivered apologies, explanations, tirades, musings, and exercises in atonement. The chaos of the pandemic exacts an enormous and unrelenting toll on doctors and other medical staff. Compassion, integrity, and dedication keep medical professionals afloat even as they're at risk of becoming casualties themselves.

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