The Sky Was Falling: A Young Surgeon’s Story of Bravery, Survival, and Hope

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. (Mar.)