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JEFFREY BROWN:Next: An emergency room doctor returns to Newark and grapples with pressing public health issues.
Ray Suarez has our conversation.
RAY SUAREZ:Dr. Sampson Davis is the fifth of six children in his family. He was raised in Newark, N.J., in the 1970s. He was surrounded by crime, drugs, and murders and by the notorious high-rise projects that earned Newark its nickname, Brick City.
Many of those high-rises have since been torn down. Dozens of other buildings in the city's neighborhoods have been abandoned. Newark remains one of the tougher urban areas in the country, with a third of its residents living below the poverty line. The city's medical system also is under stress.
WOMAN:Not ignoring you. It's just that it's been very busy.
RAY SUAREZ:Many residents lack access to primary care. The city's three remaining emergency rooms—three others were shut down in the last decade—are often packed to capacity with patients.
After making a pact with two of his high school friends graduate medical school, Dr. Sampson Davis returned to Newark to work in the E.R. to try to make a difference.
DR. SAMPSON DAVIS, "Living and Dying in Brick City: An E.R. Doctor Returns Home":All right, let's go see another patient and fast-track. Want to go out towards the waiting room.
RAY SUAREZ:The lessons he learned there and the stories of the people he met and treated are the subject of a new book, "Living and Dying in Brick City: An E.R. Doctor Returns Home."
SAMPSON DAVIS:We'd see about 100 patients, 125 patients a day.
RAY SUAREZ:I spoke with him recently at Saint Michael's Medical Center in downtown Newark, New Jersey.
Dr. Davis, welcome to the program.
SAMPSON DAVIS:Thank you. Thank you for having me.
RAY SUAREZ:The stories are gripping, memorable. The people you meet along the way are the kind of people who, I can see why they stick with you forever.
But the thing that's unusual about the book is that, along with these stories, there's all sorts of resources and diagnostic guides, and information digests, where to get help for certain kind of illnesses. It makes it an unusual book, really, in that way, the way it's structured.
SAMPSON DAVIS:It was definitely a tough book to write, in the sense that I feel like it's part memoir, part self-help, part anecdotal, so I think it's a lot of different moving pieces that came together.
But I feel like it sort of was important to tell the story of a person who had a certain ailment, vs. talking about the ailment, because if you tell the story about the mother who's a nurse, who works in a hospital, who calls the ambulance because she's having some shortness of breath, and the ambulance isn't arriving in time, and now she's succumbing, and she's having difficulty breathing, her husband puts her in a car, drives her to the hospital, and before she reaches the hospital, she succumbs and passes out.
I rush out with a gurney, place her in a gurney, and we rush her back into the emergency department. She's full-term pregnant. We do a stat C-section, remove the baby, and then unfortunately we were unable to resuscitate her.
So you have this person who is a part of the community, who's here to help the community. When she called the ambulance, the ambulance for whatever reason, it didn't show up in an expeditious way. So now at the end of that chapter, you talk about some of the signs and symptoms when you're having shortness of breath and what to do.
But then you also get to the issue, the social issue at hand. We have an overflux of patients coming into the emergency department, and if you're using the ambulance system for a non-emergent issue, you are taking away from that person who's not able to breathe. Now, imagine that was your grandmother, imagine that was your father who was having trouble to breathe.
RAY SUAREZ:Reading your book reminded me that living in the poorest neighborhoods in this country is not only unpleasant, but it's bad for you. It can shorten your life.
