An uncompromising probe into the medical industry fused with an honest account of mental illness.
In this debut memoir, a retired United States Army Captain recounts the professional and personal hardships she endured as a military medical resident.
Neighbors started military medical school in Maryland in the 2010s aiming to become an otolaryngologist—an ear, nose, and throat doctor. It was at the school that the author met Paul, an officer who’d served in the infantry before deciding to become an Army physician. The two fell into a relationship that they tried to keep secret, as Paul was married. There were warning signs about Paul that Neighbors willfully ignored, like his then-wife threatening to file assault charges, which ultimately led to his court martial. This was quickly followed by Neighbors losing her dad, Roger, to a terminal disease. After she and the freshly divorced Paul were married, they were assigned to a hospital in Hawaii, Neighbors’ home state. While Paul worried about how his court martial would play out, Neighbors struggled with her ENT residency. Apparently, some people (mostly coworkers) complained that she was rude or too abrasive; her program director even indirectly said she had “resting bitch face.” Continued scrutiny and accusations of behavior problems led to the author being put on probation and seeing a therapist at an outpatient rehab facility. Both her marriage and her mental health were deteriorating, and Neighbors, who suffered from such conditions as anxiety and depression, began abusing a prescription drug. She nevertheless fought to improve her waning health and prove herself as a medical professional, which meant fighting to keep a residency that others seemed determined to end.
The author holds very little back when turning the spotlight on herself. She candidly discusses her ever-changing state of mind, like the growing resentment she had for Paul, or her feeling that doctors and nurses at the hospital had built a conspiracy against her. The hurdles she faced as a resident are dispiriting, as coworkers generally denigrated her “Barbie in the Army” persona (presumably based on her looks) and encouraged her to stay “middle of the road” in lieu of being her best. She likewise felt out of place as a hapa (multiracial) person, as people constantly questioned her ethnicity after learning she was from Hawaii. While Neighbors aptly describes a toxic work environment, her personal life compounded her troubled residency. She had a strained relationship with her mother, who had abandoned her husband and kids for a time and blamed the author for “killing” Roger (she convinced her father to sign a do-not-resuscitate order). Neighbors delves into her own mental health issues, discussing a suicide attempt made when she was a teen as well as various afflictions, medications, and addictions that she doesn’t fully detail until late in the book. Neighbors is unquestionably a skilled writer; she delivers wonderfully concise passages that breezily take readers through years of residency while succinctly clarifying various medical conditions and hospital roles (with a glossary as a bonus addendum).
An uncompromising probe into the medical industry fused with an honest account of mental illness.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9798890341624
Page Count: 332
Publisher: CLN Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The stormy career of a top Navy SEAL hotspur. Commander Marcinko, USN Ret., recently served time at Petersburg Federal Prison for conspiracy to defraud the Navy by overcharging for specialized equipment—the result, he says, of telling off too many admirals. It seems that his ornery and joyous aggression, nurtured by a Czech grandfather in a flinty Pennsylvania mining town, has brought him to grief in peace and to brilliance in war. Serving his first tour in Vietnam in 1966 as an enlisted SEAL expert in underwater demolition, Marcinko returned for a second tour as an officer leading a commando squad he had trained. Here, his accounts of riverine warfare—creeping underwater to Vietcong boats and slipping over their gunwales; raiding VC island strongholds in the South China Sea; steaming up to the Cambodian border to tempt the VC across and being overrun- -are galvanic, detailed, and told with a true craftsman's love. What did he think of the Vietcong? ``The bastards—they were good.'' His battle philosophy? ``...kill my enemy before he has a chance to kill me....Never did I give Charlie an even break.'' After the aborted desert rescue of US hostages in the Tehran embassy, Marcinko was ordered to create SEAL Team Six—a counterterrorist unit with worldwide maritime responsibilities. In 1983, the unit was deployed to Beirut to test the security of the US embassy there. Easily evading the embassy security detail, sleeping Lebanese guards, and the Marines, the SEALs planted enough fake bombs to level the building. When Marcinko spoke to ``a senior American official'' about the problem, the SEAL's blunt security advice was rejected, particularly in respect to car-bomb attacks. Ninety days later, 63 people in the embassy compound were killed by a suicide bomber driving a TNT-filled truck. Profane and asking no quarter: the real nitty-gritty, bloody and authentic. (Eight-page photo insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 2, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-70390-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
Great fun.
The second installment of childhood recollections (after Opposite the Cross Keys, 1988) by mystery writer S.T. Haymon, who here evokes a sheltered 12-year-old's further encounters with life's earthier side.
Haymon's 1920's, upper-middle-class childhood revolved typically around school, home, loyal servants, and a pair of doting, well-educated parents—until age 12, when her father died and her mother decided to move to London. Refusing to accompany her, the precocious, comically self-confident Sylvia tried to limit this series of upheavals by insisting on remaining in Norfolk in the care of a favorite teacher—except that at the last minute her headmistress (already a sworn enemy) switched houses, arranging for two maiden schoolteachers to put Sylvia up in their house instead. Sylvia knew that the Misses Gosse and Locke were eccentric. What she didn't know was that the skinny, aggressive history teacher and the teary, puppy-like math professor were lesbians. Nor did she notice as Miss Locke's increasingly desperate infatuation with her began to lead the entire household toward destruction. Amusing characters abound—the gardener, Sylvia's only ally, whose faith in the value of a virgin's tips on the horse races led him to pay her for advice; the dour housekeeper who sang opera and downed bottles of gin; the art teacher's model who bewildered Sylvia with talk of "randy old dykes"; and the spiritual channel who informed her that her daddy was watching everything she did from heaven. Haymon's depiction of herself as an unusually clever, frequently petulant, and thoroughly practical young girl obsessed with filling her stomach while all sorts of passionate fireworks exploded around her evokes an era when secrets still existed and scandals were bursting to happen—and makes for slyly humorous, very British entertainment.
Great fun.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 1990
ISBN: 312-04986-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
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