Every Minute Is a Day A Doctor, an Emergency Room, and a City Under Siege

by Meyer, Robert; Koeppel, Dan

• ISBN13: 9780593238592
• ISBN10: 0593238591
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2021-08-03
• Publisher: Crown

Summary

An urgent, on-the-scene account of chaos and compassion on the front lines of ground zero for Covid-19, from a senior doctor at New York City’s busiest emergency room
 
“Remarkable and inspiring . . . We’re lucky to have this vivid firsthand account.”—A. J. Jacobs, bestselling author of The Year of Living Biblically 

When former New York Times journalist Dan Koeppel texted his cousin Robert Meyer, a twenty-year veteran of the emergency room at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, at the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis in the United States, he expected to hear that things were hectic. On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being overwhelmed, where do you think you are? Koeppel asked. Meyer’s grave reply—100—was merely the cusp of the crisis that would soon touch every part of the globe. 
 
In need of an outlet to process the trauma of his working life over the coming months, Meyer continued to update Koeppel with what he’d seen and whom he’d treated. The result is an intimate record of historic turmoil and grief from the perspective of a remarkably resilient ER doctor. Every Minute Is a Day takes us into a hospital ravaged by Covid-19 and is filled with the stories of promises made that may be impossible to keep, of life or death choices for patients and their families, and of selflessness on the part of medical professionals who put themselves at incalculable risk. 
 
As fast-paced and high-tempo as the ER in which it takes place, Every Minute Is a Day is at its core an incomparable firsthand account of unrelenting compassion, and a reminder that every human life deserves a chance to be saved.

Author Biography

Dan Koeppel is a former executive editor at The New York Times’s Wirecutter. He has written for national publications including Wired, Outside, National Geographic, and The Atlantic and won a James Beard Award for his food writing. Koeppel is also a recipient of a National Geographic Explorers Grant. His screenwriting credits include Star Trek: The Next Generation, and he is the author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World. His writing has been anthologized three times in The Best American Series. He grew up in Queens, New York, and lives in Portland, Maine, with his wife, the writer Kalee Thompson, and their two young boys.
 
Robert Meyer, MD, has been an emergency room doctor for over twenty-five years, spending most of his career at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, whose emergency rooms are New York City’s most visited and one of the nation’s five busiest. He is an associate professor of emergency medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He grew up in Queens, New York, and lives in Hartsdale, New York, with his wife, Janet. He has two grown children, one in medical school and another in college.