Code Gray: Death, Life, and Uncertainty in the ER

Summary

A powerful, compelling firsthand account of the moral and ethical questions emergency-room doctors face even as they scramble to diagnose patients on the brink of death.

Code Gray​ is the riveting story of a seemingly healthy forty-three-year-old woman who arrives in the emergency room (ER) in sudden cardiac arrest. The cause of her condition is unknown, and as the ER team tries desperately to revive her, they cannot seem to find why her heart stopped.

Eventually the cause is discovered—too late to save her—and it raises an unexpected ethical concern for Dr. Nahvi and the woman’s husband. With this narrative as background, Dr. Nahvi shares other stories of moral and ethical challenges, among them an elderly woman and her adult daughter who each want to enlist him in a conspiracy to shield the other from knowledge of the mother’s terminal cancer diagnosis.

Dr. Nahvi worked in two of New York’s most heavily impacted ERs in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. He describes the frantic exchange of information among the city’s ER doctors as they collectively encountered an illness none of them had ever seen before.

Ranging from the Covid outbreak to the perennial glaring inequities in healthcare that it highlighted, Code Gray is a beautifully written, heartfelt memoir that will appeal to readers of Atul Gawande and Siddhartha Mukherjee.