Photo by Kati Beshore, http://katibeshore.photography/

About the Author:

Dr. Stephanie Benjamin is an emergency medicine physician, award-winning writer, and lifelong diarist. She took up journaling to help unwind from her wild recess and snack time ventures in kindergarten and hasn’t stopped writing since.

Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, KevinMD, Annals of Emergency Medicine, GomerBlog, Chicken Soup for the Soul, among many other medical and non-medical venues. Journal entries from her third year of medical school were the basis for her first book, Love, Sanity, or Medical School.

Her siblings’ deaths inspired her to become a doctor, while 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina focused her sights on EM and EMS. She is dedicated to sharing the physical and psychological benefits of journaling, as writing has always been her therapeutic outlet.

Dr. Benjamin completed her emergency medicine residency at UCSF Fresno, followed fellowships in both EMS and wilderness medicine. As a member of CAL-MAT (California’s disaster response team), she has deployed several times to help run California’s busiest Covid field hospital. She currently practices emergency medicine and is the medical director for several EMS agencies in Southern California.

Outside of medicine and writing, she is a painter, fencer, climber, married to the most amazing person ever, proud momma to the sweetest little girl and to two lovable Rotties.

Feel free to contact Stephanie at: StephBenjaminMD@gmail.com and to follow her adventures on Twitter and Instagram @StephBenjaminMD.

About Love, Sanity, or Medical School:

As a medical student secretly turned gonzo journalist, I capture the progressive erosion of well-being and sense of altruism that happens to future doctors during the most vitriolic year of medical school: third year. Subtly typing away on my blue iPad mini, I record the entire year in real time as it unfolds around me. Each chapter in my nonfiction novel is a rotation in a different medical specialty, spread throughout different hospitals, within a small Midwest City.

Read chapters 1 & 2 here!