Overview

A powerful, compelling firsthand account of the moral and ethical questions ER doctors face even as they scramble to diagnose patients on the brink of death.Code Gray​ is the riveting story of a seemingly healthy forty-three-year-old woman who arrives in the ER in sudden cardiac arrest. The cause of her condition is unknown, and as the ER team tries desperately to revive her, they cannot seem to find why her heart stopped. Eventually the cause is discovered--too late to save her--and it raises an unexpected ethical concern for Dr. Nahvi and the woman's husband. With this narrative as background, Dr. Nahvi shares other stories of moral and ethical challenges, among them an elderly woman and her adult daughter who each want to enlist him in a conspiracy to shield the other from knowledge of the mother's terminal cancer diagnosis. Dr. Nahvi worked in two of New York's most heavily impacted ER's in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. He describes the frantic exchange of information among the city's ER doctors as they collectively encountered an illness none of them had ever seen before. Ranging from the Covid outbreak to the perennial glaring inequities in healthcare that it highlighted, Code Gray is a beautifully written, heartfelt memoir that will appeal to readers of Atul Gawande and Siddhartha Mukherjee.

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9781797144078

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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. -- Theresa Brown, author of Healing Timely and nuanced, Farzon Nahvi's exploration of health care probes the grayscale of life, from the most human of details to the overarching systemic issues...We are ever more in need of clear-eyed books like Code Gray. -- Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, author of When We Do Harm: A Doctor Confronts Medical Error

Author Information

Farzon A. Nahvi is an ER physician at Concord Hospital in Concord, New Hampshire. Prior to this, he worked as an ER physician and Clinical Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Mount Sinai Health System, NYU Langone Health, Bellevue Hospital, and the Manhattan VA. He is a graduate of Cornell University and NYU School of Medicine. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Daily News (New York), New York magazine, and other publications. In April 2019, he testified as an expert witness before Congress in the nation's first Medicare for All hearing.

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