Code Gray

Death, Life, and Uncertainty in the ER

By: Farzon A Nahvi

Narrated by: Aden Hakimi, Farzon A Nahvi

Code Gray is a “provocative and meaningful” (Theresa Brown, New York Times bestselling author of Healing) narrative-driven medical memoir that places you directly in the crucible of urgent life-or-death decision-making, offering insights that can help us cope at a time when the world around us appears to be falling apart.

In the tradition of books by such bestselling physician-authors as Atul Gawande, Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Danielle Ofri, this beautifully written memoir by an emergency room doctor revolves around one of his routine shifts at an urban ER. Intimately narrated as it follows the experiences of real patients, it is filled with fascinating, adrenaline-pumping scenes of rescues and deaths, and the critical, often excruciating follow-through in caring for patients’ families.

Centered on the riveting story of a seemingly healthy forty-three-year-old woman who arrives in the ER in sudden cardiac arrest, Code Gray weaves in stories that explore everything from the early days of the Covid outbreak to the perennial glaring inequities of our healthcare system. It offers an unforgettable, “discomfiting, and often bracing” (Bloomberg Businessweek) portrait of challenges so profound, powerful, and extreme that normal ethical and medical frameworks prove inadequate. By inviting you to experience what it is like to shift in the ER from a physician’s perspective, we are forced to test our beliefs and principles. Often, there are no clear answers to these challenges posed in the ER. You are left feeling unsettled, but through this process, we can appreciate just how complicated, emotional, unpredictable—and yet strikingly beautiful—life can be.

©2022 Farzon Nahvi, MD (P)2022 Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Critic reviews

"Just like the doctor we would wish for in a crisis, Hakimi sounds assured and calm as he delivers terrible stories with careful attention and kindness...It’s a compelling listen with Hakimi’s perfect tone and pacing as he navigates us through the stories of people who end up in the ER because they can’t afford healthcare or they’re homeless." (AudioFile Magazine)

Life and Death in the ER

Original. Very engaging story. Well written. I had my doubts about one part where the doctor was debating what to tell a patient with a poor prognosis

Deeply Moving. Insightful and Timely

I heard Dr. Navhi speak on an NPR interview and I was immediately drawn to the book.
How many of us ever stop to think about what goes on in the heads of the Emergency room staffers and how they cope with the daily load of death, doom, and mayhem?
Yes, there are bright spots in the book but frankly, the business of death and dying is a grim one and the ER staff take on more than their share of the load.
The book pulls you in from the opening chapter with glimpses of chats between doctors at the height of the Covid pandemic. It is truly maddening to read how doctors and other first responders were thrown into the line of fire, and left to fight for their survival.
The heart-wrenching stories of death/loss that Dr. Nahvi shares are sobering mainly because he matter-of-factly delivers them with no klieg lights or witty lines.
People die, families suffer great loss, struggle with grief, and the ER staff are left carrying the bag, serving as temp "comforters" trying to muster what's left when they are running on empty... zero.
Ohh, I wept and wondered why our medical system can't do better. The German patient was right, sad, and true. We can do better.
Thank you Dr. Nahvi for giving us a peek into the complex, painful, and due-for-a-massive-overhaul, industrial medical complex. My only beef with you is that Tupac Shakur is not on your music list. WTF!
To my fellow readers/listeners, get this insider's view on the world of ER medicine. You won't regret reading this book. One thing I know for sure is that it will make you grateful for the life coursing through your veins.

A view from the end

Excellent memoir that focuses more on the end of life from the perspective of someone who has been witness to America’s health care system, sharing anecdotes and experiences from COVID to random encounters that highlights a system sputtering out of control. Ultimately hopeful but a hard look at the needless struggles dealt with in the US.

I had hoped for more

I love memoirs by doctors. I expected to be completely engrossed in code gray, but the first thing that threw me was the laziness of the narrator in mispronouncing so many medical terms. CaNOOla? Metastic? It was very distracting and irritating. The second thing was the nearly constant, somewhat cliched messages about being in the moment, being grateful for the life we have because it could change at any moment, connecting with other people. Obviously, these are all good messages, but I can get them on a T-shirt, or a bumper sticker anywhere. Far too much of the book was spent on this kind of sophomoric philosophy without anything new behind it. By far, the most compelling parts of this book were the introduction, in which it feels we are in real time at the start of the pandemic, standing in the shoes of the medical professionals, who are being supported by bureaucracy and an idiot president, who is more concerned with his image, then with helping sick people, and the people who support them. the other part of the book that struck deep and hard was the story of the young woman who comes in without a pulse. This story should have been the touchstone for the author. He describes in spare terms, the devastation of the woman’s husband, and the helplessness of the medical system to change her prognosis. That was incredibly powerful. Unfortunately, moments like that, were buried in proselytizing. You could feel the author trying to emulate Atul Gawande and Paul Kalanithi, and his own voice was muted because of it.

Expected more

I’m sure that writing this was very cathartic for the author, but this sure needed a good editor. He is very sincere, but goes in far, far too long to make his points.

And the reader? Oh my gosh. I lost track of his mispronunciations. “Death-reserving?” Demured, not demurred? Talk about needing an editor. (Ca-NOO-la? In a medical memoir?)

Pretty disappointing