A Pandemic in Residence: Essays from a Detroit Hospital

by Selina Mahmood

Overview

A debut essay collection of remarkable breadth and erudition by a young Pakistani American doctor and writer. “Wry and smart.”―The New York Times Book Review

During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Selina Mahmood―in the middle of the first year of a neurology residency―found scraps of time between grueling shifts to write. The resulting collection is her personal and meticulous chronicle of an unprecedented year in medicine. It’s also the debut of a young and uncommon talent.

In the tradition of Oliver Sacks and Paul Kalanithi, Dr. Mahmood takes the science of neurology and spins it into poetry, exploring theories of the mind, Pakistani-American identity, immigration, family, the history of medicine, and, of course, the challenges of becoming a physician in the midst of a global health crisis. Skipping nimbly across continents and drawing inspiration from an array of sources ranging from Thomas Edison to Yuval Harari to Beyoncé, she has crafted an elegant, incisive, and utterly original investigation. As Salon put it, this book is “A profound, moving and unfiltered account of not just a frontline worker’s experience at an unprecedented moment, but a story of family and identity, of pop songs and PPE.”

A must-read for anyone seeking insight into the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as a broader understanding of our universal search for meaning. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948742931
Publisher:	Belt Publishing
Publication date:	05/18/2021
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Selina Mahmood was born in Detroit and serves as a second-year neurology resident there. She has also lived in Lahore, NYC, and Ann Arbor. She graduated with a major in history from the University of Michigan in a previous life before pursuing medicine. Her work has appeared in The Manhattanville Review, Squawk Back, Blood and Thunder—Musings on the Art of Medicine, The Conglomerate, and others. She has also blogged book reviews on HuffPost and worked as a reader for Boulevard, Bellevue Literary Review, and Frontier Poetry. When she isn't busy diving into the brain, she's trying to swallow her way out of it.

Editorial Reviews

"Reads like a combination of essay collection, diary, scientific article, cultural commentary, and poetry, and illuminates with sharp, elegant prose that blends fact with feeling a year like no other."—April Baer, Stateside Radio

"A Pandemic in Residence" is a must-read book....The strong personal voice develops profound sections on philosophy, history, literature and medicine, which help craft a gorgeously introspective novel [that] tackles issues of identity, loss, and navigating a tumultuous world."—Fatimah Shah, Muslim Girl

"A profound, moving and unfiltered account of not just a frontline worker's experience at an unprecedented moment, but a story of family and identity, of pop songs and PPE."—Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon

"In A Pandemic in Residence, Selina Mahmood asks her reader to walk into risk—as she did, gowned in PPE—and memory: the first COVID death occurs on page 21. I imagine reading this book again in a year, in five, in ten, and I feel afraid—so vivid does Mahmood make the work of caring for the sick of Michigan in 2020. So vivid, as well, does she make her own unique and poetic obsessions that drew her to medicine in the first place: death and neurology and family and meaning. In the end, the work is an earnest and poetic investigation of an experience that 'no longer fits in our palms'—an investigation unique in its global need and universal urgency. I cannot recommend the book enough!"—Josh Roark, editor of Frontier Poetry

"In the first year of Mahmood’s neurology residency at a Detroit hospital, COVID-19 hit. In her impressionistic and intimate account, Mahmood captures the chaos and fear of the early days of the pandemic, and then the long months of misery and grief around her. The daughter of Pakistani immigrant physicians, Mahmood moved into a hotel to isolate herself and keep them safe. She chronicles her struggle to become a doctor, deals with microaggressions, works hard to communicate with patients through her mask, is frustrated by the health care system, and contends with her own profound loneliness."—The National Book Review, 5 Hot Books feature

"Wry and smart."—Kat Eschner, New York Times Book Review

“This is not an over laudatory account of the heroism of frontline workers. . . . Rather, this is a young doctor laying bare her struggle to make sense of the search for meaning.” —Kassel Galaty, Cleveland Review of Books

From the Publisher

2021-06-02
A resident in neurology reflects on her experience at a Detroit hospital during the 2020 pandemic.

Mahmood's first book is a mixed bag. Though the narrative is brief, the author struggles to find her focus. At her best, she ably conveys the confusion and pain of the first days of the pandemic, moving month by month and sometimes day by day through a period of time when medical workers couldn't figure out where to get protective gear. They hid masks in their workroom ceiling at the hospital, where a “dead calm” concealed frantic activity and the first Covid-19 death led to many more. “The first encounter with this pandemic was fraught with fear and gusto,” writes Mahmood, “and the initial confusion ironed out into a semblance of intelligibility and eventual boredom for some.” As a neurology resident, she was not on the front lines of the pandemic, but her life was profoundly altered nonetheless. The necessity of masks made it nearly impossible to communicate effectively with stroke patients, and the author was forced to move out of her parents’ house because they were “in a concerning age bracket, with associated comorbidities.” Intertwined, not always smoothly, with the story of her life as a physician during the pandemic is that of her experience as a second-generation immigrant from Pakistan. Her physician parents also did their medical residencies at Detroit hospitals, and Mahmood hints at, but doesn’t explore in-depth, the “microaggressions” she experienced. When the author moves away from documenting the pandemic, the prose becomes florid and unnecessarily scholarly—e.g., how “imagination gave a parthenogenetic birth to the twins of fact and fiction.” Mahmood often abandons the central subject to discourse on Joan Didion, Beyoncé, and David Foster Wallace, likely frustrating readers interested in how hospitals functioned during the pandemic. A more fleshed-out version of that part of the book would have been more satisfying.

A provocative but scattered account of medicine in crisis mode.

Kirkus Reviews