Emotional Female – Yumiko Kadota

In her note to the reader at the beginning of Emotional Female, Yumiko Kadota describes herself as a “recovering doctor”. This book is her insider’s account of her time as a hospital registrar, a woman seeking a career in the male-dominated field of plastic surgery. She thought she was going to be the Australian version of Christina Yang from Grey’s Anatomy; instead, she found herself burnt out and broken down in a public health system where bullying and overwork run rife.

Emotional Female is a bit unfocused in the early chapters. The chronological recounting of details and anecdotes from Kadota’s early life make it feel more like an autobiography than a memoir, and often led me to wonder why an editor hadn’t sat her down to have a stern word about the reader’s expectations of the genre. I picked up this book to read about the trials and tribulations of working in the public health system – did I really need to know the results of Kadota’s primary school sports carnival?

Kadota comes off as a deeply earnest person in her account, reminding me of every single privately educated resume-packing School Captain I’ve ever met – whether or not that’s endearing will differ for each reader. She remains bright eyed and bushy tailed all the way through her medical studies, determined to chart a course whereby she becomes both wildly successful and broadly well-liked.

Of course, the wheels come off (as they must, else Emotional Female wouldn’t really have a story). By the time she becomes a plastic surgery registrar, Kadota is already a bit worn down by the stresses of the job. Then, she is thrown head-first into a punishing roster, working stretches of eleven, fourteen, and even twenty-plus days straight. Multiple phone calls throughout the night meant she couldn’t even find rest and respite in her own home. “My body was a machine on stand-by at all times,” she reflects (page 306).

The stress of the workload is exacerbated by the litany of microaggressions that Kadota faces as a young Asian woman in a system built by old white men. She is frequently mistaken for a nurse, or called by the name of her Asian colleague. She is told she is too confident, and too emotional. She is turned away by patients who insist on seeing a white doctor. She is sexually harassed by senior colleagues and mentors.

Despite the implicit – and even explicit, at times – pressure from her superiors to simply push through, Kadota pulls the rip cord on her medical career when she finds herself fantasising about self-harm as a way of guaranteeing herself an unimpeachable break from work (after all, she can’t be expected to perform delicate microsurgery with injured hands). She resigns, and spends over a year trying to recuperate physically and mentally. She writes a blog post about her experience that garners traction, eventually becoming Emotional Female.

Kadota’s story is deeply troubling for anyone who needs access to health care (so, all of us) or cares about workers’ rights (which should be all of us, too). That said, I think Kadota missed an opportunity to reflect on how this toxic work environment came about and the pressures placed on previous generations of surgeons that filtered down to her own experience. There’s a particular scene where she becomes upset with an intern for disturbing her at 3AM with a non-urgent question. It immediately brought to mind for me an earlier scene where Kadota, as an intern herself, was scolded by a vascular registrar for calling at midnight to ask a question. It seemed to me an obvious parallel, and a gateway to talk about the faulty foundations of the public health system that has failed so many – but Kadota quickly moved on with her own story, and left that aspect unexamined.

On the whole, Emotional Female feels a bit bloated, occasionally sliding into cliche and sometimes skipping over the broader implications of Kadota’s experiences. It might have been a more powerful read with a rigorous edit that brought her experiences as a registrar into clearer focus from the start, and some guidance about connecting one’s lived experience to the historical and social context. That said, it’s still an important and timely subject, and future doctors will no doubt benefit from Kadota standing up for herself and publicly sharing her experience.

Read Emotional Female on audiobook via Libro.fm here.