NO CRYING IN THE OPERATING ROOM is a compelling, heart-rending memoir in which trauma surgeon Dr. Cecily Wang tells of her life as an international relief doctor. Her daring relief work in Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean led Wang to view medicine as “a straightforward human service” where “the patient was all that mattered.” She writes with precision, passion, and a wry sense of humor: “The technology we have today can keep a rock alive in the ICU,” she writes. Meanwhile, regarding the conditions in South Sudan: “This week’s pet was next week’s meal.”

In 2010, Wang traveled to Haiti after a devastating earthquake: “When I got off the plane in what was left of Port-au-Prince, the stench hit me. Mounds of debris and rotting refuse were strewn everywhere. On the drive to our hotel we passed huge piles of rubble and buildings that were hardly standing.” Early in her career, Wang had to amputate most of a cancer victim’s hand in Myanmar. There were few tools available, so a nurse went out and found “a twenty-two-inch hand saw, something you’d pick up at Home Depot.”

Wang describes the “backbreaking” labor of caring for COVID patients on respirators who had to be repositioned every hour or so to get enough oxygen. She once directed a team of eight healthcare workers as they routinely flipped a three-hundred-and-eighty-pound man on a respirator to keep him breathing. The book highlights the contrasting attitudes to patient care in the developed world versus the developing world. On overseas missions, doctors worked as a team, improvising with whatever tools they could get to save lives. However, in the United States, she writes how doctors have less time for real patient care because a hospital’s administrative bureaucracy insists they fill out checklists of arbitrary “quality metrics.” That could mean having to counsel a barely-conscious gunshot victim about the need to stop smoking, Wang writes.

According to Wang, death is accepted as natural in less developed countries; therefore, keeping the patient comfortable is paramount. Too often in the United States, doctors are pushed to keep terminal patients in severe pain alive for as long as possible. Wang writes that, by the end of the pandemic, she had suffered “moral injury.” She, like thousands of other healthcare workers, was left “utterly exhausted and demoralized psychologically [. . .] more damaging than being physically overworked.”

Wang wraps up the book with a deeply personal letter to her late mother, a mercurial woman who abused her emotionally and physically as a child. Wang believes that surviving abuse drove her to help powerless people everywhere: “Maybe my missions are, in some ways, my attempt to redo our past,” she writes. Wang’s stories are so compelling that readers may want more than the book’s 198 pages. The memoir could be better organized for clarity, as Wang’s anecdotes occur over years in different places around the globe. Also, Wang could have depicted her co-workers and support staff, like the retired general surgeon who worked to heal survivors of war in Africa, with more detail. Overall, though, the author’s detailed accounts of medical work around the world help put things in perspective.

Dr. Cecily Wang’s NO CRYING IN THE OPERATING ROOM is a compelling, heart-rending memoir that will captivate readers with its honesty and gut-wrenching detail.

~Robin L. Harvey for IndieReader