Life, death & fish hooks SURGEON INEKE REVEALS ALL

Opening up about her experiences proved to be the best medicine

- Donna Fleming

Ineke Meredith's extraordinary memoir On Call: Stories From My Life as a Surgeon, a Daughter and a Mother started out as a way of acknowledge the patients whose lives crossed paths with hers during her career as a surgeon.

"It was a form of catharsis initially," she says of the notes she took to help her deal with the demands of her job. "I would go home with these stories in my head about who these people were and what had happened to them. Writing them down and expressing how they had touched me was a way of getting my feelings out, as well as paying tribute to the patients."

She compiled her words into a manuscript, which she showed to friends and editors in the publishing industry. Their feedback was all the same.

"They said it was powerful, but they got to the end and they wanted to know about me, the person who was navigating these situations, some of which were really sad and horrible.

"I then had to think long and hard about putting my life on paper and exposing so much about myself when I'd spent many years not telling anybody about things I was going through personally. In the end, I decided to do it.”