Every Minute Is a Day: A Doctor, an Emergency Room, and a City Under Siege by Robert Meyer & Dan Koeppel

Author:Robert Meyer & Dan Koeppel [Meyer, Robert & Koeppel, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780593238608
Google: JI7wDwAAQBAJ
Published: 2021-08-03T14:59:48+00:00

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It’s a Saturday morning, and Deb has just finished her rounds. As soon as she gets home, her mother, Winifred, calls, sounding worried. Deb’s father, David, is sick. Deb tells her mom that she’s on her way. She drives back down to the Bronx from her home in Westchester with her husband, Al, because her mom has told her that David is in the bathtub and is too weak to get out on his own. By the time she arrives, David has convinced Winifred that there’s nothing seriously wrong, that he’s only feeling weak and tired. He doesn’t want Deb to worry, and he definitely doesn’t want to go to the hospital. David allows Al to help him get out of the tub, while Deb stands outside the bathroom and talks to her father through the door. At six feet four, Al is strong, but he still has to tilt his father-in-law back and pull him from the tub as he leans all his weight against Al. Meanwhile, Deb’s cousin, who lives nearby, has called for an ambulance. But when the paramedics arrive, David refuses medical care, and his vital signs—including his oxygen level—appear normal.

Deb sees that her father is out of breath after his struggle to emerge from the bathtub. David was a smoker for many years, and his lungs are obstructed, so she offers him an inhaler. The device, typically used in asthma cases, doesn’t seem to have any effect. She checks his temperature again, and there’s no fever. That’s when she sends me a text. She wants to know what the proper procedure is for getting a quick home delivery of an oxygen supply. (She knows that I’m good at working the system.) She asks me if I have prescription blanks, because normally oxygen is something a doctor can write a prescription for. But that would take far too long, so instead I add Ed Pfleging, our senior vice president of facilities, to the message chain. Ed has been with Montefiore for more than three decades, and he’s the person who pulls all the different pieces of this huge hospital system together and makes it work. He might have the toughest job in our entire organization. So I ask Ed if he can get an oxygen tank over to Deb’s father. Ed’s reply: “What’s the address?”

Within an hour, David has his oxygen. For the next week, Deb manages her father’s care at home, calling him in the morning, again during the day, and once more at night. At this point, there’s little reason to suspect that he has Covid. With no fever and with his breathing difficulties explained by a preexisting condition, he doesn’t meet the current diagnostic criteria, especially considering that Deb has asked her parents not to leave the house.

David, at eighty-four, still has an active business as a realtor in the Bronx. He and Winifred struggled and sacrificed to help Deb through medical school and her younger sister, Tanya, through law school.

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