Yumiko Kadota - Emotional Female

I have a big tribe of emotional females to thank for helping me to bring this book to life!

First, I must thank my agent, Clare Forster from Curtis Brown. At the start of 2019, when my blog post first hit the news, I had no idea what a literary agent even was. Thank you, Clare, for all the hand-holding, introducing me to the world of publishers, and getting me in touch with the wonderful women at Penguin Random House!

Big thank you to my publisher, Nikki Christer. From the moment I met Nikki, I knew she was fully invested in my story. Thank you for being so generous with your time, making sure I was okay during the writing process, and being so encouraging even when I didnt have confidence in my ability to write this book.

To Roberta Ivers, who helped me with the first structural edit thank you. I learned so much from you. It was a steep learning curve, having never written a memoir before. Your technical expertise, honesty and passion really helped me elevate this book.

To Catherine Hill thank you for all the hard work you put into the editing process. From the first time I met you, I knew I could trust you. I felt we had a similar taste in writing, and that you would treat the book with great care and respect. Thank you for being so thoughtful. I will really miss seeing your name in my inbox!

Thanks to every single person from Penguin Random House who has worked to get my story out there. I honestly feel as though each member of the team was behind me from the start, even before we met in person. I know that a lot of work goes on behind the scenes at different stages. Im so grateful for the incredible support and enthusiasm for this book from all departments.

To everyone who had my back during some of the toughest times in my career thank you. I remember the small acts of kindness. All of them. Its sad that I wasnt able to continue, but I look back fondly at some of the years I spent as a doctor in the public health system, and all the friendships I made.

Thank you to my GP and psychiatrist for looking after me when I was so, so unwell. Being a doctor can be a thankless job, but I hope you know how much I appreciate everything youve done for me to help me get back to good health. Its taken a very long time, but I always had faith that youd get me through it and I wont forget your kind words. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

A special thank you to my sisters, to whom this book is dedicated. Youve always been my unwavering cheer squad. When times were low, you sent so many BuzzFeed quizzes to help me figure out what sort of potato I was, based on my personality traits (Im a waffle fry). Even though youre both in Japan now, our group chat always keeps me going. Im so lucky to have sisters as best friends. Im proud of you, and love you both.

Last but not least, many thanks to you my reader for picking up this book. Perhaps enjoy is the wrong word, given some of the difficult content in here, but I hope it was worth the read. Thank you for giving up your time to read my story.

Yumiko Kadota is a medical doctor from Sydney. She resigned from public hospital work after experiencing burnout and now works in medical education and private health. Her story entered mainstream media after she blogged in February 2019 about her experiences as a trainee in the health system. Nowadays shes rebuilding herself, starting with her health. She blogs on a wide range of topics that reflect her various interests; eco-warrior, yogi, book worm.

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@mindbodymiko

Id always had a path. But now that I was off it, and so far from the recent stress and mayhem, I didnt know if, when or how I would get back onto it. I had no handbook to follow.

Yumiko Kadota was every Asian parents dream: model student, top of her class in medical school and on track to becoming a surgeon. A self-confessed workaholic, she regularly put knife before life, knowing it was all going to be worth it because it would lead to her longed-for career.

But if the punishing hours in surgery werent hard enough, she also faced challenges as a young female surgeon navigating a male-dominated specialty. She was regularly left to carry out complex procedures without senior surgeons oversight; she was called all sorts of things, from emotional to too confident; and she was expected to work a relentless on-call roster sometimes seventy hours a week or more to prove herself.

Eventually it was too much and Yumiko quit.

Emotional Female is her account of what it was like to train in the Australian public hospital system, and what made her walk away.

Yumiko Kadota is a voice for her generation when it comes to burnout and finding the resilience to rebuild after suffering a physical, emotional and existential breakdown. This is a potent, unflinching work from a major new talent.

March 2005, Sydney

Look at the person to your left. Now look at the person to your right. Two of you will fail medical school, forewarned the dean of Medicine. It was orientation week at university and I sat in a lecture hall with 250 other first-year medical students. I had just finished high school at an all-girls school on the upper North Shore of Sydney. Being only one of two students from my school who were accepted into Medicine, I had high expectations of myself. But as medical students you are suddenly surrounded by people who were the top of their schools, so you know you might go from being the crme de la crme to getting creamed.

Flora was the other student from my school whod made it into Medicine. She was my friendly competition throughout high school. She still resented me for coming first in her favourite subject, biology, but despite us being rivals, Flora was always supportive. Medicine doesnt have to be a zero-sum game. We can both be successful. Flora was living on campus and I envied her freedom as she got to roll out of bed five minutes before lectures. I knew I wasnt going to enjoy having to catch two buses to uni from where I lived with my family.

Throughout my schooling, both the left and right side of my brain were fostered, reflecting my dads logical side and my mothers creative side. When it was time to apply for university degrees, it was between Music and Medicine. I chose my analytical left brain, much to the relief of my mother. Perhaps it reflected her own regret in choosing her right side. Yoshiko never had used her literature degree. Instead, shed done what was expected of Japanese women at the time and become a stay-at-home mum.

Theres a joke that Asian parents force their kids to study either Medicine or Law. That wasnt the case for me, but it was for Dad. Hajime wanted to study Mathematics or Philosophy, but they werent acceptable options to my grandparents. Hajime always resented going to law school. He didnt enjoy it much, so he decided that hed let my sisters and me do whichever subjects we wanted. I guess some would say he was lucky that I chose Medicine on my own, fulfilling the Asian parents dream.

That first day in the lecture hall, I looked up at the screen. It showed my path ahead as an image of a ladder representing the medical hierarchy. After six years of medical school, the first rung is an internship in a public teaching hospital, rotating between Emergency, Medical and Surgical terms. Next you become a resident, then a registrar, and finally a consultant in your chosen specialty.