I am an orthopaedic trauma surgeon. I specialize in intimate disasters defined by blood and broken bodies. Show me somebody whose every bone is shattered and I will know what to do. Show me somebody whose life is draining away, and I will remain calm, reminding myself of a saying in trauma surgery: all bleeding stops. I have spent years training--and training others--not just to fix, but to heal: to help people move past shock and damage and reenter their lives again. In 2020, I became both doctor and patient. I was shown a city whose every norm was shattered by the worst health crisis of our time. By virtue of fate and circumstance, that city--Nashville, Tennessee, where I had immigrated from Iran as a six-year-old child--looked to me to decide what to do.

I didn't know. I lived in that city with my wife and young children, my parents, grandmother, extended family, colleagues, and friends. Nashville was part of me and I was part of Nashville. I was shattered too. In this we were all the same. Leaders of nations, leaders of states and cities, leaders of companies and congregations and schools, parents of children, essential workers, rich and poor, young and old, solitary souls living in cavernous houses and generations crammed together in tiny apartments. In the early days of the pandemic, we were all stunned and scared by what we didn't know. My hometown asked me to help figure it out.

Given my position in March 2020 as the chair of the Metro Nashville Board of Health, the mayor asked me to lead the Metro Coronavirus Task Force, later known as the COVID-19 Task Force. Like everyone working with me, I was initially at a loss. But I was able to join with some of the best minds and hearts I have ever met, and together we did the best we could. We needed to move mountains, and some days we did. We were able to accomplish things on behalf of Nashvillians that--sometimes mere hours before--had seemed impossible. On these good days, I felt myself part of something larger, more powerful, and more consequential than anything I'd ever experienced. I walked in the clouds with my compatriots, both humbled and proud to be a human being and an American--living in a country with a singular capacity for ingenuity and innovation. On other days we failed to move anything in the right direction, much less mountains.

On these days I cursed my feet of clay and my limits, particularly my naivete and ignorance of the interdependent and complex systems that make our cities work. I also sometimes found myself helpless as competing interests attacked each other and attacked me, or as selfishness and fear overcame our better natures, or worst of all, as politics rather than people's needs drove decisions. On the bad days, I was filled with sorrow, frustration--and something more, something unfamiliar. I had known sorrow and frustration. I had known failure. I had struggled to save people's lives and lost them when their injuries proved too much to overcome. But I had never known anger like the anger I felt when people who had the power to help solve the massive problems of the pandemic refused to do so, preferring to duck and posture and blame and lie, then leave local officials and volunteers like me to deal with the fallout. It was weird to be Nashville's hero on the good days and Nashville's villain on the bad ones.

I wondered how a guy like me--a classic striver who grew up trying to make good on my opportunities--wound up becoming either one.