Colleen M Farrell

THE WASHINGTON POST As the coronavirus overwhelmed hospitals in New York last spring, some medical schools offered their final-year students an unusual option: They could graduate early to begin working as physicians on the front line of the pandemic. In her new book, Life on the Line: Young Doctors Come of Age in a Pandemic, Emma Goldberg takes us into the lives of six students who, despite their fears of contracting the novel virus (and in some cases, despite the pleas of their parents), felt themselves called for duty.

These students from New York University (NYU), Mount Sinai and Albert Einstein had already completed all the core requirements of medical school. Had the pandemic not disrupted social rituals, they would have spent the spring celebrating their residency matches and graduations, surrounded by friends and family. Instead, they chose to face the many challenges of being Day One doctors (even a simple Tylenol order prompts an anxious triple-check) amid a pandemic that was overwhelming their senior colleagues, killing hundreds of New Yorkers daily and isolating millions more.

In the opening pages we meet Sam, a NYU medical student. Sam joins the COVID wards at Bellevue Hospital which once cared for more patients with AIDS than any other hospital with a sense of historic purpose.

As I read about Sams entry into Bellevue, I could feel myself standing in the eerily quiet, glass-encased lobby of that hospital. When the pandemic began, I was an internal-medicine resident at Bellevue. Like many health-care workers on the front lines of this crisis, the trauma of the spring surge goodbyes over FaceTime, beds crammed into makeshift intensive care units (ICUs), endless alerts called overhead has left me with scars. It has been hard to revisit that time in my mind without my heart racing and stomach clenching. I worried that reading this book would reopen those wounds.

But remarkably, with her sensitive reporting and deeply human portrayals of Sam, Gabriela, Iris, Elana, Ben and Jay, Goldberg has created a work that not just documents a significant moment in time but helps us heal from it, too. For anyone seeking to understand, or remember, what New York and its hospitals were like in the spring of 2020, Life on the Line is essential reading.

News stories from New Yorks COVID spring emphasised the medical interventions of intensive care: intubation, dialysis, CPR. The new doctors entry into the hospitals is steeped in war metaphors. The vice dean for academic affairs at NYU tells them they are joining the COVID Army. At Montefiore Hospital, they are dubbed the Coalition Forces. Like new military recruits, they don layers of protective gear, put their bodies at risk and witness a horrifying number of casualties.

But the stories in Life on the Line offer a refreshingly different view of the pandemic than those eye-catching headlines and talk of war. Given their inexperience and their institutions appropriate commitments to minimise their exposure to the virus, the interns are largely removed from the adrenaline-pumping action. In one scene, Sam literally has a patients door closed in front of him. Inside the room, the resident physicians perform CPR, trying to resuscitate the patient, whose heart has stopped. Sam stands at a mobile computer in the hallway, placing orders. His is a necessary job, but as Goldberg puts it, if this were a TV medical drama, Sam would be an extra.

The interns distance from life-or-death emergencies allows different, yet vitally important, aspects of pandemic health care to shine through. Iris cares for a man who survived the COVID ICU but still breathes through a tube in the front of his neck and is barely conscious. Not sure how to act around him, she makes a point of cheerily introducing herself to him. After days without him ever seeming to register her presence, when she tells him that his family loves him, she sees a tear fall from his eye.

In one of the most moving passages of the book, we meet Manny, a 38-year-old man with Down syndrome and severe anxiety whom Jay is caring for. Manny initially came to the hospital because his father, his sole family member, was sick with covid. Manny had no one else to care for him, and so the hospital staff allowed him to live in the hospital while his father was admitted. When his father tragically dies of the virus, Manny has nowhere to go, so he is admitted to the hospital as a patient until Alicia, the social worker, can find him a safe home. Jay wholeheartedly devotes herself to Mannys care, even accompanying him on a visit to a group home.

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