London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

When I studied my MSc in the Control of Infectious Disease at LSHTM in 2005, I had not yet become an emergency physician. I was still trying to understand where medicine, public health and humanitarian work might fit together in the life I wanted to build.

LSHTM expanded the way I thought about health. Epidemiology asks us to look beyond the individual patient and consider the systems, environments and social conditions that influence who becomes sick, who receives care, and who gets left behind. That perspective stayed with me as I went on to train in emergency medicine and eventually build a career that moved between the emergency department, global health and humanitarian work.

Over the years, I completed additional training in tropical medicine through the Gorgas Institute in Peru, interned with the World Health Organization, and became involved in point-of-care ultrasound education in East Africa. More recently, I helped develop an ultrasound fellowship program at Addis Ababa University designed to expand practical diagnostic skills in settings where access to imaging can be limited.

For a long time, I thought my drive toward this kind of work came simply from wanting to be useful.

Writing my memoir forced me to understand that motivation differently.

Rise After Silence: An ER Doctor and the Patients Who Healed Her tells the story of my seventeen years in emergency medicine through ten patients whose lives changed the way I understood trauma, survival and healing. Woven through those stories is my own journey of coming to terms with violence and instability in my childhood - experiences I had spent much of my adult life outrunning through achievement, medicine and service.

Looking back, I can now see that my attraction to humanitarian work was not separate from my personal history. When you have known what it feels like to be vulnerable and powerless, there can be an enormous pull toward places where people need someone to show up. Medicine gave me a way to turn helplessness into action. Humanitarian work widened that lens further: suffering is rarely just biological. It is shaped by poverty, conflict, gender, geography, access to care and the structures surrounding us.

But the book is also about learning that helping other people cannot be a substitute for examining our own wounds.

Some of the patients I cared for in the emergency department and through my humanitarian work became unexpected teachers. Their courage challenged the stories I had told myself about strength. They helped me understand that resilience is not simply the ability to endure, achieve or keep functioning. Sometimes resilience means finally becoming quiet enough to acknowledge what happened -and allowing yourself to heal from it.

That is ultimately why I wrote Rise After Silence. Although it contains difficult stories, I wanted to write a hopeful book: one that explores how people can carry painful histories without allowing those histories to determine the rest of their lives.

My years since LSHTM have taken me in directions I could never have predicted. From global health and emergency medicine to brain-health advocacy and now, authorship. But the underlying question has remained surprisingly consistent: What helps human beings survive, recover and build healthier lives?

I suspect I will spend the rest of my career trying to answer it.

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