Field Notes from Death's Door

This Is Going to Hurt meets Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures) — a rollicking, smart and self-aware memoir about the extremes of the human experience, the limits to compassion, and what trying to save the world actually entails.

In her early 30s, Katie Treble felt stuck — in her life, in her career as an emergency doctor, and in a dead-end relationship. Moving from her home in England to sunny Byron Bay hadn't been the answer she was hoping for. Wanting to kickstart her life and put her starry-eyed idealism into action, she signed up to work for Médecins Sans Frontières. She thought it would be an adventure — a chance to find meaning, purpose and maybe do some good in a world gone mad with greed.

Katie was dispatched to the war-torn Central African Republic, to a town called Bria: a remote blood diamond-mining town controlled by rebel militia, one of the poorest, most lawless, and violent places on earth and a grinding humanitarian crisis the world has largely ignored. Arriving to live in an ex-diamond trader's compound set against a backdrop of poverty, hunger, disease, and gunfire, Katie was thrown in the deep end.

Sweltering through long shifts in a hospital tent equipped with only the most basic resources, she fought to save an endless stream of patients while her heart broke again and again at how little a human life could be worth. Survival off-shift meant self-anaesthetising via the basic resources of bad local lager, camaraderie, card games, and the odd ill-advised sexual liaison. Things were already hard enough, but when an army of rebel mercenaries descended on Bria, destroying much of the town and massacring countless civilians, Katie had to dig deep within herself to understand the meaning of resilience, the fundamental nature of human interconnectedness, and when all seems lost, the power of bearing witness as the ultimate act of kindness and compassion.

Coruscating, clear-eyed and self-deprecating, Field Notes from Death's Door is a sharply observed account of how a young woman's faith in humanity was challenged, shattered, and — painfully — rebuilt.