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Title details for The Sky Was Falling by Cornelia Griggs - Available

The Sky Was Falling

A Young Surgeon's Notes on Bravery, Survival, and Hope

by Cornelia Griggs
Cornelia Griggs
Audiobook
2 of 2 copies available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
2 of 2 copies available
A NATIONAL BESTSELLER

In this "essential work that provides lasting insights and lessons for the individual and society" (Jerome Groopman, MD, New York Times bestselling author), a young pediatric surgeon and mother reveals her dramatic, cathartic diary, written as she worked on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic at one of New York City's busiest hospitals.
For many of us, the experience of the peak pandemic was eerily incongruous. We were sequestered in our quiet homes but reminded of the devastation by the never-ending ping of news alerts. Dr. Cornelia Griggs's experience was altogether different. A pediatric surgery fellow in New York City, she was entering the final victory lap at the end of nine grueling years of training. She was set for a big graduation celebration and looking forward to spending some real time with her husband and kids. Then came COVID-19.

Initially, Griggs encouraged her friends and family not to panic. However, as mysterious cases began showing up in the hospital, and then hospital supplies started disappearing from shelves, she couldn't hold back the feeling that this was going to be worse than she had thought. She wrote a startling op-ed in The New York Times called "The Sky Is Falling" that went, for lack of a better word, viral. The piece was read by over a million people, and Griggs appeared on CNN.

Having once aspired to be a journalist, Griggs found that the only way to make sense of what she was witnessing around her and maintain her sanity was to keep a diary. The Sky Was Falling is her day-to-day account of what most of us were grateful to only see in the news—the sharply increasing case numbers, the dwindling supply of respirators, the lack of clarity on how to treat this new disease. Harrowing, deeply personal, and page-turning in the way of the best medical memoirs, it tells the story of healthcare professionals who went beyond what they thought they were capable of to heal their patients, and themselves.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    March 12, 2024

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781797169613
      • File size: 167060 KB
      • Duration: 05:48:02

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      January 15, 2024
      Pediatric surgeon Griggs shares her frantic experiences during the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic in this poignant debut memoir. Griggs was months away from completing a New York City surgical fellowship in early 2020, just before hospitals started to fill with Covid patients. Shortages in personal protective equipment for healthcare workers led her to send her children out of state, and to publish a widely read March 2020 op-ed in the New York Times that urged the public to share their PPE. Much of her account is focused on the daily quagmires of the early pandemic, as when Griggs commends a pediatric ICU nurse who disregarded protocols to soothe an infant who needed to be touched, or when she denounces coworkers for stealing masks from the hospital for outside use. Interspersed throughout are gripping passages about performing complicated surgeries on young patients and flashbacks illuminating Griggs’s path to becoming a surgeon. Her well-calibrated combination of polemic and personal history will keep readers glued to the page. It’s a welcome addition to the shelf of medical memoirs about the peak of Covid-19. Agent: Susan Gluck, WME.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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