Top Highlights

• nearly three hours after it was due to end. It was almost midnight.
• That night cemented my decision to become a doctor so that when I encountered another Tony, his life would not have to end in a preventable death.
• Every time he got sick, we’d make him better. But medicine could not treat the poor air quality he breathed. Medicine could not change the poverty, instability, stress, and powerlessness of his and his mother’s lives. This Tony, too, was a testament to the notion that the currency of inequality is years of life.
• I chose emergency medicine so that I could treat everyone and turn no one away, not immigrants afraid of deportation or people who couldn’t pay.
• I could resuscitate a young man dying from gunshot wounds, but what could I do about the violence on the street, violence so consuming that elementary schools didn’t have recess outdoors? I could stitch up a child’s laceration, but what could I do about the ache in her belly because the last meal she ate was her school lunch two days before? I coul...