Review: "No Crying in the Operating Room" by Cecily Wang

No Crying in the Operating Room by Cecily Wang
Published June 2023 via Gatekeeper Press
★★★

When Cecily Wang was growing up, her mother dreamed of an easy life for her—one with fewer challenges and more luxuries; one in which she could perhaps have a family and a part-time job and busy herself with artistic pursuits. But Wang wanted more—she wanted to be a doctor, and once she was a doctor (a surgeon), she wanted to push herself beyond the norm in the US. Off to Haiti she went, then, Haiti and South Sudan and Syria and wherever she could go while juggling the pay-the-bills medical jobs in the US with relief work through the Salvation Army and, later, Médecins Sans Frontières.

No Crying in the Operating Room chronicles some of that journey—the disconnect that Wang felt between the way medicine works in the Global South and the way it works in the US and the expectations that patients have when resources are vast versus those when resources are scarce; also the disconnect between the way she envisioned her future and the way her mother envisioned her future.

The structure of the book feels a bit unresolved to me, but Wang is precise (as you might expect from a surgeon) with her language and assessments. (Also, sometimes, funny in a way that is so dry that I almost missed it—measuring the sterility of a conflict-zone operating room by the number of flies and concluding that no flies meant that "it's possible that the room cannot support life" (loc. 839)...) I'm not a medical (or relief) worker, but I'm fascinated by the ins and outs—and pitfalls—of medical relief work, so I appreciated reading about her experiences working in various far-flung places. Again, a disconnect or dichotomy: this is the work Wang feels most called to and where she feels most useful, but relief work is by definition not meant to be sustainable, and the medical jobs through MSF are generally only meant to be short-term placements. In any case, this makes for a thoughtful addition to the subgenre.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.