Book title: Life On The Line
ISBN: 978-0-06-307338-8
Author: Emma Goldberg
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication year: 2021
Price: RM123.90
In a war you have some idea of where the bullets are coming from. But here you don’t. You have no idea where your enemy is. It’s everywhere, really.
BY CAROLINE JACKSON
Like in Malaysia and elsewhere, the world was slowly but surely gripped by COVID-19 back in 2020.
“Life On The Line” authored by Emma Goldberg is a narrative nonfiction of real events based on interviews with six young New York doctors — Sam, Gabriela, Iris, Elana, Jay and Ben, who by all accounts come of age in a pandemic.
New York Times journalist Goldberg sets her scene close to home at Bellevue Hospital and Montefiore Medical Centre, both understaffed and overwhelmed in early 2020.
In March of that year, all New York medical schools asked for volunteers to serve their community during the pandemic and these doctors enlisted to fight COVID-19 as interns or first year residents.
Taking the Hippocratic oath via Zoom, these doctors were sent into well-established New York hospitals such as Bellevue and Montefiore, the epicentres of the city, the epicentre in the United States.
Goldberg illuminates how the pandemic redefines what it means for them to undergo this trial by fire as caregivers, colleagues, classmates, friends, romantic partners and concerned family members.
This is all the more true when they are treating patients whose stories mirror their own in some way, forming emotional bonds with them like, for instance, Gabriela with her Hispanic family background, Sam, who is openly gay and Iris, the daughter of Chinese immigrants.
With hospitals under siege and overwhelmed by the surge in cases of COVID-19, described as “a virus far smaller than a grain of sand” upended America’s medical institutions, these newly minted doctors immediately saw their field’s inequities laid bare.
The people most likely to get sick and died from COVID-19 were the country’s most vulnerable, non-white and working-class people. African American and Hispanic people were hospitalised at four times the rate of white Americans. The virus hit hardest in the city’s Black and Hispanic communities.
Apart from shocked at the horrific suffering that they had to witness, another challenge for the new doctors was the pervasive fear of infection.
More than 1,700 health care workers died in the United States in the early months of the pandemic.
As Goldberg narrates in the book: “Rookies feeling the weight of the frontline care, but COVID felt worse — the fear heavier, the death toll higher.”
Between February 29 to June 1, 2020, New York City had seen more than 200,000 people diagnosed with COVID, 50,000 people hospitalised and more than 18,000 who died. The poorer a neighbourhood was, the higher its hospitalisation and death rates.
On March 1, the city announced its first confirmed case, a 39-year-old woman who had travelled back from Doha a week earlier.
On Ben’s first day of work at Montefiore in May 2020, New York State saw 478 coronavirus deaths. Governor Andrew Cuomo was meeting with then President Donald Trump to hammer him on the lack of suitable testing and the state’s largest nursing union was suing it for unsafe working conditions during the pandemic. New York Life Insurance and China prepared to announce a $100 million funds for the families of health workers killed while treating COVID-19 patients.
As a reader, one cannot help but feel the gravity of the situation where there were homeless patients who wanted to be discharged to sleep on the subway instead of in a shelter, because they knew they could isolate from the virus easily on the train than in a crowded city facility.
There were also homeless patients who preferred not to be discharged at all, because where would they sleep after leaving Bellevue?”
Bellevue doctors called their main patient population the three “uns” — undocumented, uninsured, undomiciled (homeless).
According to the narrative, the role of medicine was to do what the rest of us couldn’t — dodge death. But in crisis like COVID, the divide comes undone. Patients spiral quickly, and doctors know they aren’t always in control.
And as hearts and lungs failed, as families began to grieve, the doctors began their own process of mourning. Then they turned, right away, to the long list of others who needed their care.
The pandemic has made people across the age spectrum realise that they are vulnerable, that people are frail, that you are a mortal being.
A good read, I will definitely recommend “Life On The Line” not because it is written by a fellow journalist but rather due to its straight-forward factual style of human fragility and hope.
