Writer to Doctor and Back Again
By Dr. Tali Lando
Before I was a doctor, I was a writer. From the time I was a young child, I dreamed of writing a book. I poured my thoughts into daily, angsty poems, stapling messy loose-leaf pages together under grand titles like Tali’s Book of Thoughts scrawled across the top.
By my late teens, the dream was eclipsed by a new goal, becoming a doctor. That pursuit consumed my twenties and early thirties, leaving no creative space. For over a decade, I wrote nothing but dry research articles stripped of personality.
After completing my fellowship in pediatric airway surgery, life came at me hard. I gave birth prematurely to my third child, who spent two long months in the NICU. Soon after, my beloved father was diagnosed with a deadly brain tumor. Two weeks later, I discovered my own advanced breast cancer. In the chaos of these converging crises, I began to write again.
I wasn’t a fiction writer. I wrote what I knew, in my own voice, from my own life. My first essays were short vignettes: absurd, heartbreaking, sometimes laugh-out-loud stories of survival. I shared them privately with friends while I processed the medical tsunami that had swept over my life. Though writing was cathartic, I also believed it had broader value. If a specialty-trained surgeon like me could be blindsided by the mix of humor, pain, and complexity in illness and treatment, then surely other women could, too. I didn’t want them to feel alone.
From that desire came my first book, Hell & Back: Doctor & Patient, Wife & Mother, Dragon Slayer, a brutally honest, darkly funny guide of sorts. It was clever, uplifting, and entirely rejected by every publisher I approached. Undeterred, I self-published, designing the cover with the help of an Icelandic Etsy artist I’d never met. I spent a year hustling, sometimes triumphing, sometimes failing, but always pushing forward.
Meanwhile, I returned to the demands of surgery, raising my daughters, and, most urgently, surviving Stage 3C breast cancer. I needed to live long enough to tell another story, this time from a place of strength, not fear. My next book would be a sweeping account of my surgical career, a compendium of patient stories shaped by over a decade of blood, sweat, tears, and scalpel work. One night, I sat bolt upright with a title: Breathless. And, so it began.
Over the next year, I assembled de-identified patient sagas with rich narrative arcs, twists, and moments that defy belief. The editing was grueling, exacting, and deeply rewarding.
Now, with an editor, publisher, and book coach rolled into one, plus a publicist and a circle of wiser author friends, I’m climbing the steep hill toward literary success again. I refuse to give up, because Breathless is more than a medical memoir. It’s surgical drama, human vulnerability, and sharp wit from the perspective of a surgeon who has literally held tiny lives in her hands.
And that surgeon is me.
BREATHLESS
Heralded as “a testament to the precision, resilience, and compassion that define the very best of medicine,” Breathless is a powerful, unflinching, and deeply human exploration of life and death in the pediatric operating room.
Told from the unique perspective of a high-stakes pediatric airway surgeon, this gripping collection of true surgical stories by Dr. Tali Lando invites readers behind the doors of a modern trauma hospital to experience what it’s like to be responsible for the breath — and sometimes the very life — of a child.
Through 16 exquisitely rendered chapters, Dr. Lando shares unforgettable tales of tiny preemies, trauma victims, surgical miracles, and heartbreaking losses. Each case is recounted with unvarnished honesty, medical insight, and emotional depth — from an infant in respiratory crisis at a prison visitor center to a teenage boy who nearly suffocates after a biking accident. Meet the spunky little girl named Heaven who changed Dr. Lando’s life forever and explore the quiet sacrifices of a surgeon-mother navigating home life in the aftermath of trauma. The stories are as riveting as they are revelatory.
PREORDER HERE
Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing
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