I really enjoyed this memoir especially as someone who is interested in working in the ER however I felt that it would have benefitted from a more cohesive and joint story to keep the reader engaged instead of flitting between tales which would have held more importance together than on their own!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing this book in exchange for an honest review.
This is an interesting look at the more human side of ERs as opposed to the gritty medical side. Patient advocates are priceless and the ER is a perfect place to be able to give that assistance.
I did get a little bored with the philosophy parts but I did enjoy the psychology parts.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this eARC.

Kathryn Kyker’s Surprised by Nothing: Surviving the ER World of Worst-Case Scenarios is not your typical memoir—it’s a raw, clear-eyed meditation on what it means to bear witness to the worst days of other people’s lives, day after day, and still find a way back to your own humanity.

Kyker, a former ER social worker who once fainted at the sight of blood, chronicles her 30-year journey through the emotional minefield of emergency medicine. But this isn’t a book about heroism or adrenaline. It’s about the quiet, corrosive toll of hypervigilance, the numbing effect of repeated trauma, and the slow unraveling of one’s inner life in the name of professional duty.

What makes this memoir stand out is Kyker’s refusal to sensationalize. Her prose is unflinching but never gratuitous, laced with dry humor and a poet’s sensitivity to the absurd. She doesn’t just recount cases—she interrogates the emotional architecture of survival: how we compartmentalize, how we disconnect, and how we eventually must reckon with what we’ve buried.

The book’s title is a brilliant paradox. In a world where worst-case scenarios are the norm, Kyker finds herself “surprised by nothing”—and yet, in her quest to reclaim joy, curiosity, and connection, she becomes surprised by everything. The result is a memoir that’s as much about healing as it is about endurance.

Surprised by Nothing is a vital read for anyone who’s ever worked in crisis care, loved someone who has, or simply wondered how we keep going when the world keeps breaking. It’s not just a story of survival—it’s a quiet, powerful argument for reclaiming the parts of ourselves we lose in the process.