In a new, exclusive excerpt from her book, Marie Brenner goes inside the ICU—and the minds of several frontline heroes during the daunting early days of the pandemic.
Granted complete access to the New York Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital system the author–awriter-at-large–crafted a saga of bravery, ingenuity, and loyalty under horrific conditions at one of the world’s greatest hospitals as it battled COVID . In this adaptation from her new bookBrenner focuses on a legendary ICU doctor and her highly charged interactions with the head of hospital—himself frantically trying to save lives in his own way.
Was this medicine or something else? A few months later, she saw the boy on the pediatric floor. “And what about the day you had the pizza?” she asked, feeling guilty about this instance in which she broke the rule. Had she made the right choice? “It was the best day ever,” he told her. “The last time I ate anything.” A few weeks later, he was gone. So maybe it was medicine after all.
The truth was that you had to be there on 5 South to understand what was going on, and Corwin felt caught between the fierce tug of his calling as a doctor and his responsibilities as head of the hospital. For years, he had been a cardiologist most at home in the ICU and had run ICUs at Columbia-Presbyterian. Yet, because of the hospital’s legal policies, he was no longer allowed on the floor. FaceTime was the best he could do.
But there were only so many machines that worked, and there were so, so many patients, some with better chances than others. Day after day, hour after hour, as scores of desperately ill people rushed to the hospital, there were often three or four patients who needed ventilators at the same time and, on several occasions, only one or two that seemed to be available.
Looking at the computer screen, Lief saw that 100 ventilators were set to arrive—a miracle—then saw that 60 of them were broken. They were potentially usable, but refurbishing them—finding parts; testing them, fingers crossed—would result in an immeasurable delay. And because of the hastily drawn-up rules of engagement, the 40 that did work would likely go to all the other pop-up ICUs and the emergency departments .
Though few on 5 South knew it, for weeks Corwin had been on Zoom call after Zoom call, battling with the state and FEMA and the White House and the suppliers they had long relied on from dawn to midnight, trying to get new equipment, parts for broken machines, and, especially, masks—one million of them. Those on 5 South could also not see the effort being put in by the hospital’s chief operating officer, Laura Forese.
“Are you kidding?” Corwin snapped back. “Do you have any idea how bad this is? Why don’t you come and see? No one is selling masks out the back door of my place. And the board members are not jumping the line to get into the ICU.” At Weill Cornell, Lief’s small, windowless office is on the fifth floor, just off a corridor at the entrance of 5 South, the medical intensive care unit. There are 20 spacious beige patient rooms, glassed in for germ control, with state-of-the-art equipment. The cubicles circle a long island of desks for residents, nurses, respiratory therapists, and physician assistants.
Lief, a 43-year-old mother of two, has cascading silver-blond hair and an almost encyclopedic recall of the patients who passed through her 20-bed unit during the spring of 2020, even the ones who weren’t under her direct care. There were the patients who could be saved even after months on a ventilator and the patients she thought could be saved but who, it turned out, could not.
Like many in critical care, Lief rarely spoke of her work to people who weren’t in medicine. It was hard to explain the heartache you felt when a patient flatlined; it was even hard to explain the explosion of joy she would get when she and her team were able to save a patient, thanks to knowledge and procedures that had not even existed a few years before.
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