Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink

4/5 stars

What's it about? In a thorough and fascinating investigation, Sheri Fink details the individual and systemic failures that led to the unnecessary deaths of patients stranded by Hurricane Katrina at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans. Fink delivers an unsettling account of ethical questions in healthcare and injustices magnified by our poor preparedness for disasters.

How’d I find it? My book club at work is reading this for its summer pick. I enjoyed much of Five Days at Memorial in its audio format, which was like listening to one long episode of Serial. As a nurse, this book has been hard to shake off.

Who will enjoy this book? The true crime elements recall David Cullen’s Columbine. Try The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom for a companion read to provide additional context about New Orleans during Katrina.

What stood out? The depth of Fink’s research is evident in the gripping narrative driving Five Days at Memorial, a page-turner the likes of The Executioner’s Song. We get to know the real people behind the devastating decisions they made for Memorial’s patients, and that perspective provides nuance to their actions. Fink takes on the underlying factors that led to the crimes at Memorial, including a history of discrimination, the politics that allowed for unsafe conditions in a hurricane-prone region, and the deficiencies of our healthcare system.

Which line made me feel something? Though written in 2013, Five Days at Memorial raises issues that would haunt the COVID-19 pandemic years later: “The goal, participants said, was to save as many lives as possible while adhering to an ethical framework. This represented a departure from the usual medical standard of care, which focuses on doing everything possible to save each individual life. Setting out guidelines in advance of a crisis was a way to avoid putting exhausted, stressed frontline health professionals in the position of having to come up with criteria for making tough decisions in the midst of a crisis”.

Every Deep-Drawn Breath by Wes Ely

4/5 stars

What's it about? Physician Dr. Wes Ely discovers that the ICU practice of sedating and immobilizing critically ill patients leaves many with chronic illness and disability if they survive their hospitalization. Through research, determination, and collaboration, Dr. Ely vows to cultivate a practice of beneficence (doing good) instead of benevolence (wishing good). An impassioned plea for compassion in critical care.

How’d I find it? A colleague recommended this title for our book club, and oh, how it fired up us nurses. I borrowed my copy from Multnomah County Library.

Who will enjoy this book? Every Deep-Drawn Breath pairs well with Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, which Dr. Ely lists as an inspiration for his book.

What stood out? Dr. Ely’s belief in his mission comes through the page, and it’s hard to resist his conviction. For healthcare workers, this book will read as a call to action; my fellow nurses and I spent much of our book club meeting discussing ways to introduce long-term quality-of-life activities into our daily practice. Every Deep-Drawn Breath’s most valuable content is perhaps the resource section at the end of the book with practical information for patients, families, and the medical community.

Which line made me feel something? I need to know more about this Halpern: “Compassion can be understood as empathy in action. I had long been a believer in researcher and bioethicist Dr. Jodi Halpern’s work on clinical empathy, especially her teaching that compassion should never be an extra step in our care, but an adverb to describe how we care.”

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

4/5 stars

What's it about? Emergency room surgeon Atul Gawande reflects on the tension between the promise of medicine and the reality of death in this thoughtful ethical conversation. How can healthcare facilitate “a good death,” since we all have to go sometime?

How’d I find it? A grandmother’s shelf of books she left behind, telling me to take what I wanted. I kept the lion’s share.

Who will enjoy this book? If you like the fusion of memoir and health, try The In-Between by Hadley Vlahos or When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi.

What stood out? As a nurse, I loved Dr. Gawande’s moral wrestlings, as I encounter them frequently in my own practice. To cement his arguments, Gawande presents case studies from friends, family, and patients that make the stakes all the more real. Medicine can prolong our lives, sure, but at what cost? What do we lose when we resist our fate?

Which line made me feel something? The second chapter of Being Mortal drew me in, and this statement played no small part: “with our average life span in much of the world climbing past eighty years, we are already oddities living well beyond our appointed time. When we study aging what we are trying to understand is not so much a natural process as an unnatural one.”

A History of Present Illness by Anna DeForest

4/5 stars

What’s it about? A medical student recounts her training as a doctor, meditating on her path to medicine, the failures of modern care, and the mystery of existence. DeForest plays with truth and perception in this odd, dark novel that lingers.

How’d I find it? I had read a review of this book in the New York Times last year and came across it at Enoch Pratt Free Library. I enjoyed this enough to want to buy my own copy to flip through again later.

Who will enjoy this book? The tone, length, and bending of reality in A History of Present Illness reminded me of Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, but its ennui shares much with Jenny Offill’s Weather.

What stood out? Every dreary, dreamy book on existence brings something a touch different to the table, and A History of Present Illness serves up the jaded view of a physician reckoning with death, all the more convincing since DeForest is a neurologist herself. I loved how our narrator tells the reader little lies throughout, manipulating and editing her story as she goes. She’s a challenging character through which to experience medical school and residency, and it makes for compelling reading.

Which line made me feel something? “Remember looking in the mirror as a child, saying your name? This face, you’d think, these hands. This house and yard and mother, going to bed without dinner on cabbage night, jumping from the roof of the shed. The bravery of it all, the obvious import. But this is how it ends: surrounded by strangers, your clothes cut off with shears, cold blue hands, and gone then, with your body humiliated and left alone to stiffen.”

The Shift by Theresa Brown

3/5 stars

What's it about? Theresa Brown gives an inside look into the daily work of an oncology nurse. We follow her through the twelve hours of a shift as she juggles four patient’s needs on a busy hospital floor. Brown captures well the hectic pace of a nursing shift and the struggle to continuously advocate for patients in a complex decision-making environment.

How’d I find it? With nursing school at its end, I wanted to see what contemporary books had to say about nursing. My thanks to DC Library.

Who will enjoy this book? This read would most appeal to those interested in the medical field but who don’t know much about nursing, such as high school or college graduates.

What stood out? Experienced nurses can have a reputation for being disgruntled, and Brown does not shy away from commentary on her coworkers and how hospitals function. Some of the negativity would have been better invested in fleshing out the patients in this book or sharing more about Brown herself. Without a stronger human element, the tone of the book is sanitized, distant.

Which line made me feel something? On nursing as storm chasing: “As a child I experienced only wonder while running after flashes of rain; I saw a world, a heaven. Now, grown up, I try to draw on my child’s sense of awe and commitment as I help Sheila confront, perhaps, the end of her time on earth.”

The In-Between by Hadley Vlahos

2/5 stars

How’d I find it? An aspiring hospice nurse, I picked this up at DC Library to learn more about the specialty.

Why not 3 or more stars? The premise of this book captivates: a seasoned hospice nurse shares what she’s learned about death and whatever comes after. There’s not much meat here beyond Vlahos’s observations and anecdotes that read as if they’ve been told many times, which might be meal enough for some. I would have appreciated a deeper dive into the subject matter, supplementing the personal with an academic or historical perspective about the experience of death. What is the medical experience of death? How does practicing medicine affect the beliefs of health care practitioners? How can family members prepare for the end of life? All questions neither asked nor answered.