This Is Going to Hurt meets Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures) - a rollicking, smart and self-aware memoir about the extremes of the human experience, the limits to compassion, and what trying to save the world actually entails.

In her early 30s, Katie Treble felt stuck - in her life, in her career as an emergency doctor, and in a dead-end relationship. Moving from her home in England to sunny Byron Bay hadn't been the answer she was hoping for. Wanting to kickstart her life and put her starry-eyed idealism into action, she signed up to work for Medecins sans Frontières. She thought it would be an adventure - a chance to find meaning, purpose and maybe do some good in a world gone mad with greed.

Katie was dispatched to the war-torn Central African Republic, to a town called Bria: a remote blood diamond-mining town controlled by rebel militia, one of the poorest, most lawless, and violent places on earth and a grinding humanitarian crisis the world has largely ignored. Arriving to live in an ex-diamond traders' compound set against a backdrop of poverty, hunger, disease and gunfire, Katie was thrown in the deep end. Sweltering through long shifts in a hospital tent equipped with only the most basic resources, she fought to save an endless stream of patients while her heart broke again and again at how little a human life could be worth. Survival off-shift meant self-anaesthetising via the basic resources of bad local lager, camaraderie, card games and the odd ill-advised sexual liaison. Things were already hard enough, but when an army of rebel mercenaries descended on