One Night at Mount Sinai

Aja Newman went to the emergency room for shoulder pain. Her doctor was a superstar. What ’s the worst that could happen?

- By Lisa Miller

SOMETIME AFTER 2 A.M. on January 12, 2016, Aja Newman roused herself from her hospital gurney and made her way down the long hallway to the bathroom. She had checked in at Mount Sinai’s Emergency Department more than four hours earlier with severe shoulder pain. Aja is a practical person and had been reluctant at first. “Emergency rooms are for emergencies is what I was taught,” she says. But the pain had been dogging her all day long and amplifying steadily, so that by 6 p.m., while she was shopping at Target, “my hands were tingling, and I was afraid.” The attending doctor who examined her first was Andy Jagoda, the head of the Emergency Medicine Department, who has been at Mount Sinai for 20-plus years. Aja was too uncomfortable to remove her coat, so Jagoda took her vitals with it on. She received anti-inflammatories for her pain as well as X-rays and an EKG to rule out a pulmonary or cardiac problem. Within an hour, Aja was feeling well enough to have changed into a hospital gown in Room 8, a small single room near the doctors’ station with a large glass window in the door. But at the shift change, when Jagoda officially handed her off to David Newman, an overnight attending physician, with a passing joke—You two might be cousins! You have the same last name!—he noted that Aja still seemed very tense; hospital records show that David Newman ordered four milligrams of morphine, which a nurse administered around midnight. Jagoda had been a friendly type of guy, Aja remembers, but “I never got the friendly thing from David Newman. He was very straight to the point.”