It’s nearing the end of my shift at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and the paramedics burst through the swinging double doors with a badly injured commuter strapped to a stretcher.
“What is it?” I ask as the ambulance sirens scream in the background.
“This man was struck by the subway,” the paramedic tells me as blood trickles out of the victim’s ear.
“Is his airway intact?” I ask calmly as I put on my surgical gown and mask. “Is he breathing OK?”
As horrifying as this scene is, I’m prepared.
Back in 2003, my sister, Christine, was the one lying helplessly on a stretcher — she had been pinned between the train and the subway platform after falling through the gap.
She’s the reason I left behind my career in investment banking and consulting to become an ER doctor.
Before Christine’s accident, we were living it up in our 500-square-foot Nolita apartment. A graduate of Brown University with a degree in economics, I was employed by Goldman Sachs, while my sister, who is three years older than I, worked in fashion merchandising.
This was 2001. And, while the finance industry was not at its peak, analysts like me still enjoyed a number of investment banking perks and luxuries on top of a generous salary.
Every morning I’d put on my freshly pressed suit and take the subway down to Broad Street to make it to my desk by 8 a.m. I’d pull up my spreadsheets for the real estate acquisition I was working on that day.
After ordering in lunch, I’d hop on a conference call with colleagues in London and Brazil. Then we’d order in dinner and bill it to the office. At about 9 p.m., I’d call a car service, and a sleek town car would take me home.
But it wasn’t long until my comfortable existence was shaken up. 9/11 happened and a lot of people in lower Manhattan re-evaluated their lives. I wanted out of the rat race, so I left Goldman Sachs and got a job at a consulting firm working on projects to redevelop the downtown area.
I also made time to take vacations and, in April 2003, left New York to spend a week in Mexico with a friend. Late one night, the hotel phone rang and jolted me awake. My oldest sister, Joy, was so distraught, she could hardly get the words out. “It’s Christine — she was in a serious accident,” she stammered. “She fell onto the subway tracks.”
I frantically searched for the first flight home — and later found out that, while I was in the air, Christine stopped breathing and had to be resuscitated.
Walking into her room at Bellevue Hospital, I saw from the outline of her body under the stark white sheets that her leg had already been amputated. “I tried to wiggle my toes, but they’re not moving,” said Christine, who was hooked up to a morphine drip.
She didn’t know yet that her leg was gone.
“It’s OK,” I replied, not wanting to shock her with the news until she was well enough to handle it. “I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
After that, I slept in the reclining chair next to her bed for a month, only going home every couple of days to shower.
My social butterfly of a sister had dozens of friends come see her. Ironically, some had been out drinking at bars near the Spring Street station when the accident happened.
They’d seen the FDNY trucks rush to the scene, unaware that Christine was the victim. The trucks had to lift the subway car off of my sister’s body because she’d gotten stuck between the last two cars of the 6 train.
When Christine had fallen getting off the subway, people on the platform waved their arms and screamed to get the conductor’s attention. But he didn’t notice, and the train pulled away, ripping off her leg. It wasn’t until another passenger pulled the emergency lever in the train car that the subway screeched to a halt.
When the hospital interns and residents, many of whom were about the same age as my sister, heard about her accident, they were easily able to relate to her. As I sat next to her, trying to keep her spirits up, trying to distract her from the pain, they’d visit before or after their shifts.
Each time, I saw how much compassion they had — my sister wasn’t just a patient, they truly cared about her.
Seeing the difference the staff at Bellevue made in my sister’s life — my whole family’s lives — made me realize I couldn’t go back to my consulting job.
Sure, I was helping people in an abstract way, but I wanted to be hands-on, saving people’s lives. I would never feel complete until I was a doctor.
So, instead of climbing up the ladder at Goldman Sachs or in consulting, I signed up for medical school.
In 2005, I began studying at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in The Bronx. The Wall Street work ethic prepared me for the long, grueling hours. I’d seen what a career was like outside of the hospital, and this was where I belonged. Since I loved every rotation equally, I ended up working in the ER, where you get a little bit of everything.
Today, I live with my husband, Rishi Madhok, another ER doctor, in Philadelphia, and I’m eight-and-a-half months pregnant with our first child.
A typical day at work starts at 6 a.m. and ends as late as 11 p.m. These days, I am a neurocritical care fellow and an emergency medicine attending at the Hospital for the University of Pennsylvania, located in West Philadelphia. I see scores of gunshot wounds to the head and spine — but no two days are the same.
And Christine is doing great. She’s back at work and a star Flywheel student. Most of her fellow spinners have no idea she has a prosthetic leg.
Meanwhile, on this season of “NY Med,” the reality show that followed me and the other doctors when I was an ER resident at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, cameras caught the patient rushed in during my shift who’d been struck by the subway car.
When I started working in the ER, I thought I’d be squeamish when a case like my sister’s came in.
In fact, Christine’s accident prepped me for the absolute worst. And that’s walking into the ER and seeing someone you love on the table.