“A moving, thoughtful memoir of life in the medical trenches.”
Description
Code Gray is a “provocative and meaningful” (Theresa Brown, New York Times bestselling author of Healing) narrative-driven medical memoir that places you directly in the crucible of urgent life-or-death decision-making, offering insights that can help us cope at a time when the world around us appears to be falling apart.
In the tradition of books by such bestselling physician-authors as Atul Gawande, Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Danielle Ofri, this beautifully written memoir by an emergency room doctor revolves around one of his routine shifts at an urban ER. Intimately narrated as it follows the experiences of real patients, it is filled with fascinating, adrenaline-pumping scenes of rescues and deaths, and the critical, often excruciating follow-through in caring for patients’ families.
Centered on the riveting story of a seemingly healthy forty-three-year-old woman who arrives in the ER in sudden cardiac arrest, Code Gray weaves in stories that explore everything from the early days of the Covid outbreak to the perennial glaring inequities of our healthcare system. It offers an unforgettable, “discomfiting, and often bracing” (Bloomberg Businessweek) portrait of challenges so profound, powerful, and extreme that normal ethical and medical frameworks prove inadequate. By inviting you to experience what it is like to shift in the ER from a physician’s perspective, we are forced to test our beliefs and principles. Often, there are no clear answers to these challenges posed in the ER. You are left feeling unsettled, but through this process, we can appreciate just how complicated, emotional, unpredictable—and yet strikingly beautiful—life can be.
Reviews
“Timely and nuanced, Farzon Nahvi’s exploration of healthcare probes the grayscale of life, from the most human of details to the overarching systemic issues. As we grapple with unprecedented challenges to both healthcare and society, we are ever more in need of clear-eyed books like Code Gray.”
"At turns discomfiting and often bracing, the book uses one specific case (a previously healthy woman who has a heart attack) as a stalking horse to present [Nahvi's] real point, namely that when it comes to life and death, what we see and what we say are rarely black and white."
“A provocative and meaningful book, Code Gray takes us to the hard places in health care, where the ‘correct’ treatment choices can be impossible to know. Fortunately, Dr. Nahvi is caring and percipient. He is an amazing guide to the portal separating life and death, sickness and health, and the real world and the hospital--that is, the modern Emergency Department.”