Every Minute Is a Day
A Doctor, an Emergency Room, and a City Under Siege
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- ¥2,000
発行者による作品情報
An urgent, on-the-scene account of chaos and compassion on the front lines of ground zero for Covid-19, from a senior doctor at New York City’s busiest emergency room
“Remarkable and inspiring . . . We’re lucky to have this vivid firsthand account.”—A. J. Jacobs, bestselling author of The Year of Living Biblically
When former New York Times journalist Dan Koeppel texted his cousin Robert Meyer, a twenty-year veteran of the emergency room at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, at the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis in the United States, he expected to hear that things were hectic. On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being overwhelmed, where do you think you are? Koeppel asked. Meyer’s grave reply—100—was merely the cusp of the crisis that would soon touch every part of the globe.
In need of an outlet to process the trauma of his working life over the coming months, Meyer continued to update Koeppel with what he’d seen and whom he’d treated. The result is an intimate record of historic turmoil and grief from the perspective of a remarkably resilient ER doctor. Every Minute Is a Day takes us into a hospital ravaged by Covid-19 and is filled with the stories of promises made that may be impossible to keep, of life or death choices for patients and their families, and of selflessness on the part of medical professionals who put themselves at incalculable risk.
As fast-paced and high-tempo as the ER in which it takes place, Every Minute Is a Day is at its core an incomparable firsthand account of unrelenting compassion, and a reminder that every human life deserves a chance to be saved.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Emergency room doctor Meyer and his journalist cousin Koeppel (Banana) describe in this heart-wrenching report the devastating toll Covid-19 took on the Bronx in the spring and summer of 2020. Drawing on interviews with hospital staff and Meyer's "texts, emails, and confessional phone calls" during the height of the crisis, the authors vividly describe the suffering of infected patients at Montefiore Medical Center's Weiler Campus, many of whom died alone. The disease also affected friends and family members of staffers; the parents of Deborah White, medical director of the emergency department, both came down with Covid and were admitted to Montefiore. White only asked for special treatment after her father died, requesting that his body be kept in the hospital morgue, and not loaded into a refrigerated truck, until she could make funeral arrangements. Meanwhile, Meyer's mentor became severely ill and nearly died after initially refusing hospitalization. The authors capture the ad hoc response of even the most skilled doctors to an unprecedented calamity, describing the chance discovery that turning patients onto their stomachs was a safer alternative to ventilators, and raise hard questions about the U.S. health-care system's lack of preparedness. Readers will gain a visceral appreciation for what it took to battle the first wave of the pandemic.
