The Doctor Who Couldn't Stop Crying

Dr. Rachel Nguyen had treated thousands of patients during her twenty-two years at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. She had learned to compartmentalize, to move efficiently from one trauma to the next. But on a Tuesday evening in March 2019, she sat in the hospital stairwell and wept. A seventeen-year-old boy had come in with a gunshot wound — the third teenager from the same Englewood block in six months.…