Cut Open: A Surgeon’s Stories of Loss, Resilience, and Growth

Leadership Lessons Surgery Never Taught—the Nonclinical Skills That Save Careers Surgeons and health care professionals are trained to fix the human body, but they are poorly prepared for the nonclinical realities that accompany their careers—complications, harsh criticism, difficult personalities, leadership failures, and the silent weight of moral injury. Most try to push through by imitating senior colleagues who were never taught the nontechnical skills either, and the result can lead to guilt, anxiety, shame, and the belief that they're the only ones struggling. Cut Open offers a different path. Trauma and acute care surgeon Dr. Daniel Eiferman shows readers how to build resilience, leadership, psychological safety, and emotional stability through story-driven lessons forged in the high-stakes environment of the operating room. Opening with the worst complication of his career, he reveals how the profession's unwritten expectations crushed him and how finding meaning in his own suffering reshaped the way he leads, teaches, and practices medicine. Drawing from real surgical cases, personal hardship, and years of teaching physicians, Dr. Eiferman gives readers a practical, memorable, and honest tool kit for the parts of medicine no one teaches: conflict, feedback, bounce-back skills, internal narrative, perspective, and the difficult personalities no one trains you. In this book, you'll learn how to: Recover after complications and failures and learn how to find personal growth after bad outcomes. Break the cycle of self-criticism using feedback from your trusted "inner circle", process-over-results thinking, and the "Your Loss" mindset. Create teams that feel safe, steady, and high-performing. Persist even when "Life's Not Fair". Lead with integrity and consistency—whether you're guiding peers, trainees, or interdisciplinary teams, with or without formal leadership training. Direct, candid, and grounded in lived experience, Cut Open is for surgeons, physicians, residents, nurses, and anyone working in environments where the stakes are high and mistakes carry weight. If you want to recover faster, lead better, and feel more satisfaction in your professional life, this book will show you how.