A PANDEMIC IN RESIDENCE

A resident in neurology reflects on her experience at a Detroit hospital during the 2020 pandemic.

Mahmood's first book is a mixed bag. Though the narrative is brief, the author struggles to find her focus. At her best, she ably conveys the confusion and pain of the first days of the pandemic, moving month by month and sometimes day by day through a period of time when medical workers couldn't figure out where to get protective gear. They hid masks in their workroom ceiling at the hospital, where a “dead calm” concealed frantic activity and the first Covid-19 death led to many more. “The first encounter with this pandemic was fraught with fear and gusto,” writes Mahmood, “and the initial confusion ironed out into a semblance of intelligibility and eventual boredom for some.” As a neurology resident, she was not on the front lines of the pandemic, but her life was profoundly altered nonetheless. The necessity of masks made it nearly impossible to communicate effectively with stroke patients, and the author was forced to move out of her parents’ house because they were “in a concerning age bracket, with associated comorbidities.” Intertwined, not always smoothly, with the story of her life as a physician during the pandemic is that of her experience as a second-generation immigrant from Pakistan. Her physician parents also did their medical residencies at Detroit hospitals, and Mahmood hints at, but doesn’t explore in-depth, the “microaggressions” she experienced. When the author moves away from documenting the pandemic, the prose becomes florid and unnecessarily scholarly—e.g., how “imagination gave a parthenogenetic birth to the twins of fact and fiction.” Mahmood often abandons the central subject to discourse on Joan Didion, Beyoncé, and David Foster Wallace, likely frustrating readers interested in how hospitals functioned during the pandemic. A more fleshed-out version of that part of the book would have been more satisfying.

A provocative but scattered account of medicine in crisis mode.