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LESSONS FROM CHAOS
Notes of a 'Simple' Surgeon - A memoir
LESSONS FROM CHAOS is the unconventional memoir of a surgeon who spent two decades operating in war zones and disaster areas across the globe. From landmine injuries and cholera camps in South Sudan to hippo and crocodile attacks in Malawi, Adam Kushner’s story is not one of heroism, but of curiosity, irreverence, and survival. Where others saw tragedy, he often found absurdity.
Kushner writes with blunt honesty, closer in spirit to Anthony Bourdain than to the polished doctor-writers of the operating room. He admits he chased these missions not to “do good” but because they were thrilling, and often fun. That candor led to clashes with NGOs, expat colleagues, and even friends back home, who recoiled when he rejected the tidy “hero narrative.” Alongside the chaos came moments of beauty and humanity, including missions with his wife, Reinou, and lessons about trust, resilience, and what truly makes an “expert.”
Spanning from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe, LESSONS FROM CHAOS is both field guide and confession, exposing how global health systems stumble, how aid money gets wasted, and how humor becomes a lifeline in the darkest places. Ultimately, it reframes war surgery and disaster relief not as noble sacrifice, but as lived experience: messy, complicated, and full of hard-earned truths about what it means to work, love, and parent after a life spent in the world’s hardest places.
Operation Health
Surgical Care in the Developing world
Basic surgery is a crucial part of public health prevention.
A teenage mother arrives by donkey cart to a hospital after attempting to deliver her baby in the bush. A young father faces the loss of a leg after receiving a gunshot wound that will not heal. A man walks miles to a hospital for a pain in his side caused by an appendix that burst five days earlier. Without access to surgical resources, millions of people with conditions like these become disabled or die.
In Operation Health, Adam L. Kushner argues that not only are severe medical conditions— like a strangulated hernia or obstetric fistula—treatable by surgical means in low-income countries; they are, in fact, surgically preventable. Although the World Bank estimates that 11 percent of the global disease burden is treatable by surgery, more than a quarter of the world's population lacks access to straightforward and life-saving surgical procedures.
Operation Health makes a strong and compelling justification for adding surgical care to the global health agenda by providing an overview of dangerous but repairable medical conditions common in developing countries. Every chapter opens with a vignette by Kushner which tells the remarkable story of the patients and situations he encountered in the field. Carefully crafted case studies demonstrate the power of surgery to heal people suffering from potentially debilitating conditions, including clubfoot, obstructed labor, and broken bones.
The chapters—written by world-renowned surgical experts—cover related medical topics such as epidemiology, women's health, cancer, and trauma in locations from Sierra Leone to Nepal, Ghana, Mongolia, and elsewhere. This detailed and compassionate book will be of great interest to medical professionals, students, public health policy makers, philanthropic donors, and those with a general interest in global health.
Operation Crisis
Surgical Care in the Developing World During Conflict and Disaster
How can medical workers provide effective surgical care in the midst of war or natural disaster?
Surgical care is increasingly recognized as a critical component of global health, and strong surgical skills, teamwork, and poise under pressure become even more imperative during conflict or disaster. When faced with hospital bombings or devastating earthquakes, healthcare personnel must develop special techniques and abilities to ably care for patients despite limited resources and a disrupted health system. In Operation Crisis, Dr. Adam L. Kushner brings together 22 medical experts from around the world to recount their experiences in the field when disaster struck. These candid firsthand accounts from both local and international aid surgeons provide clinicians and public health practitioners with insightful lessons for effectively treating surgical patients under the most grueling of circumstances.
Moving from conflict settings that include war zones in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Syria, and South Sudan, Operation Crisis also touches on post-earthquake Haiti and Nepal and post-tsunami Indonesia. Individual themed chapters cover mass casualty training, burn care, obstetric care, sexual violence, and landmine injuries. Combining personal stories with lessons learned and possible interventions, these vivid and affecting essays detail the immediate aftermath of conflict and disaster while pointing the way to improving care for future victims of crisis.
Intended to spark further discussion and function as an advocacy tool while highlighting situations where surgical care can save lives and reduce disability, this book is a valuable resource for medical professionals, students, policy makers, international aid organizations, and philanthropic donors.
Operation Ebola
Surgical Care during the West African Outbreak
What can surgeons do when patients arrive at the hospital in need of emergency care—and showing telling symptoms of Ebola?
One of the horrors of the West African Ebola outbreak was the decimation of the area’s already thin ranks of surgeons. As Ebola spread, health facilities closed, and some doctors—afraid of catching the disease—left the region or stopped performing surgery. Many of those who stayed contracted Ebola and died. As the pool of doctors available—and willing—to perform surgery dwindled, treatable conditions unrelated to the disease, including appendicitis, unrepaired hernias, stomach ulcers, and obstructed labor, went untreated with devastating results.
Drs. Sherry M. Wren and Adam L. Kushner both worked extensively with surgeons in Ebola-ravaged countries during the 2014 outbreak. Recognizing that there was no guidance available for how to perform surgery under such dangerous conditions, Wren and Kushner collaborated to create official guidelines for safe surgical procedures in cases of confirmed or suspected Ebola. Operation Ebola documents these procedures and describes in vivid detail the conditions that faced both local surgeons and the international surgeons who came to help.
Bringing together a group of medical experts from Sierra Leone and across the globe to tell their stories and offer hard-learned lessons, this book is a riveting first-hand account of performing surgery in under-resourced parts of the world. Through these health workers’ eyes, readers will come to understand what it feels like to wear personal protective equipment (PPE) while operating, what dangers remain when using PPE, how to construct an Ebola maternity ward, and how to give anesthesia to patients during a time of Ebola. A succinct and gripping exploration of how an outbreak can affect surgical care and the surgeons who provide it, this book will interest medical professionals, students, policy makers, donors, and anyone who cares about Ebola or global health.
Bio
Adam L. Kushner, MD, MPH, FACS is a surgeon who has operated in war zones and disaster areas across more than twenty countries. He founded Surgeons OverSeas, a nonprofit that expanded access to surgical care in low-income countries, and has written extensively on global surgery. Born and raised in New York City, he now lives in Anchorage, Alaska, where he divides his time between consulting, writing, and fishing for salmon.