Unsung heroes

Mert Erogul, a physician and professor, is Airway’s co-founder.
Credit...Laila Stevens for The New York Times

I had a dear friend who started out being an ER Doc. One day I asked him about ER as the sight of blood, though I'm getting better being a cancer survivor, proved I was a wuss but I digress. To. quote A, "It was the best time of being a doc. Terrifying, intense, oftentimes disheartening and brutal, you realized you matter. It tests you to the max as there's no time to fool around. You either have it or you don't. I did."

I miss him big time but I digress ...

Grace Glassman took the mic. A 56-year-old emergency physician, she launched into a story of the day she was preparing to do a rare and gruesome procedure called a lateral canthotomy.

The patient was an intoxicated male who had tried to hang himself with his bedsheets the previous night. Now he had a bloody mass behind his eyeball. “If people are squeamish, I suggest you get your AirPods out, put them in and you turn up your music now,” Glassman said. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Nine doctors were gathered at a Brooklyn Public Library branch in Fort Greene on a Saturday night to tell true stories at an event called Airway. All work in Brooklyn at Maimonides Health, most of them in the hospital’s emergency room. They were taking the night off to try to talk honestly about the pride and occasional inadequacy they felt in their work. In concept, Airway is like the Moth — ordinary people telling everyday stories — but with all the vérité drama of HBO Max’s scripted E.R. show “The Pitt.”

Glassman continued. The lateral canthotomy — a cut, then a probe and snip under the skin at the outer corner of the eye — would save the patient’s vision. If done correctly, the eyeball would “not come, like, out out, like roll off the table,” she said, with a canny smile. It would merely relieve the pressure on the optic nerve by loosening the eyeball in its socket. The audience — doctors intermingled with members of the lay public — laughed uneasily.

One idea behind Airway is to show doctors not as godlike figures but as real people.
Credit...Laila Stevens for The New York Times

Unsung indeed.