The Desperate Hours: One Hospital's Fight to Save a City on the Pandemic's Front Lines by Marie Brenner

Author:Marie Brenner [Brenner, Marie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Disease & Health Issues
ISBN: 9781250831934
Google: irgwEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Published: 2022-06-21T20:56:41+00:00

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At Columbia, Chief Resident Cleavon Gilman would later say, he may have been the most unlikely doctor in all of NewYork-Presbyterian. He had grown up poor in northern New Jersey, never knew his father, and his stepfather died of an overdose. He was frequently harassed by the police, once at gunpoint. Difficulties from a terrible stutter prompted him to drop out of high school. He eventually returned, but after he graduated, his prospects remained dismal. “I could have been a bouncer at a strip club or a drug dealer,” he told a reporter. “Those were the only opportunities.” If he hadn’t gotten out of there, he believed, he would have ended up in jail or dead.

Thanks to an extremely unlikely coincidence, he escaped. Sitting on the curb waiting for the police to let him go after they’d falsely accused him of carrying someone else’s license plates, Gilman glanced up and saw a billboard: JOIN THE NAVY AND SEE THE WORLD. He did.

Gilman’s high score on the military vocation test gave him career options, and he chose the medical path. Once he finished boot camp, he went to the Naval Hospital Corps School in Great Lakes, and was trained to provide medical care. His initial assignment was to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center outside Washington, DC. One day he was taking care of a patient when he looked up at a TV showing the Twin Towers. He stopped, transfixed. He had been to New York many times. But al-Qaeda’s attacks hit close to home in a literal sense too—Walter Reed was not far from where American Airlines Flight 77 smashed into the Pentagon. Before the morning was over, Gilman knew that the United States was going to fight back and that his time at Walter Reed was about to end.

He was sent to Camp Lejeune to train with the Marine Corps as a hospital corpsman. In 2004, he was deployed to Iraq. He and a surgical company built a hospital; an especially challenging task, as they were frequently under attack while doing so. “The first few days out there we were mortared and a few of our own people were casualties.” The first attack came in the early evening. “I was taking a shower.… I was like, ‘What is that?’” The mortars were very close; he could feel the encampment shake. “People were saying, ‘Get out of the shower, get your flak jacket, get your pistol—we’re under attack.’” He was told, “‘They need a corpsman at the clinic, at the hospital,’” and faster than he ever had, he dried off and dressed. “We ran across from the barracks over to the clinic and there were just multiple casualties, people who had severed legs, spinal-cord injuries.”

During his time in Iraq, Gilman would again and again and again race to help save soldiers suffering from the most grievous damage. “When you’re in it, you’re just in it. You clearly don’t have any time to think about anything else but what you’re there to do.

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