Emergency Medicine Physician. Healthcare Innovator. Creative Writer.

I am a Sierra Leonean-American award-winning writer, emergency medicine physician and healthcare innovator. With over two decades of clinical experience, my work blends storytelling and medicine to explore themes of resilience, humanity, and healing. My essays and short stories have been featured in The New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe, Midnight & Indigo, and leading medical journals such as the Journal of the American Medical Association.

My Work

Of Prayers and Cures and Very Pretty Girls (Published 2016)

I grew up in Sierra Leone, on the campus of Fourah Bay College, the oldest university in West Africa. My father was an engineering professor, my mother an accountant and together they agreed that someday I would become a doctor. They wholeheartedly encouraged me to study the sciences. My father, in particular, embraced the impartiality of science and math. “Wherever you go, two plus two will always equal four,” my father routinely told me. I could be a small African girl who spoke English with a...

‘May God hold the scalpel steady in your hand’ — and other blessings my grandmother bestowed on me - The Boston Globe

I was reminded of this one morning in 2004 when, as a first-year resident physician, I walked into the Johns Hopkins emergency department ready to begin my shift. Arranged in a semi-circle, feet toward me, were patients doing palpable warfare with death and disease. For one of those five souls, death was summoning urgently. Let us call him Patient X.Not in a capitalistic sense that God’s favor is for sale but, rather, that our good deeds can be transformed into grace and fortune. In Sierra Leone...

Become | Iyesatta Massaquoi Emeli

Musu sat on a big rock. A beige bar of caustic soap stood vertically on the pile of dirty laundry at her feet, calling to her. She was late getting to this river, and she would be late returning to her home. Her head was full of backwards sojourns, of futile attempts to reimagine a past already written in permanent marker.
The sky was without clouds, a never-ending blue canvas that had the potential to soothe her scattered brain. There was a soft breeze, a natural fan for the sun’s heat. It was...

Something Magical

There was a little man sitting in the center of my head. “I will never tire,” his whole countenance seemed to say. He had 8 arms extending all the way to the periphery, like spokes on a wheel. Each arm held an oversized hammer. At the end of each hammer were embedded shards of freshly broken glass. He sat, legs crossed, and with great strength, rapidity, and force, this little man banged away at every corner of my skull. This was what it felt like to have the worst headache of my life...

Maggot—Iyesatta Massaquoi Emeli—Eclectica Magazine v27n3

Photo Art by Michael DooleyThis is a part of Biology I like: dissecting the maggot. I had seen enough of these plump bundles of puss swarming in the school's latrine to know them well. My classmates work silently around me, all in green and white uniforms, all intently examining the white presence before them. There are more than 40 of us; therefore, more than 40 maggots as well. I poke the bulging stomach of my fresh specimen with a pointed piece of metal and wonder when it was harvested. Was i...

Petrichor—Iyesatta Massaquoi Emeli—Eclectica Magazine v29n1

Painting by Elaine Brown FolgarPetrichor: the fragrance of the earth herself. I love that smell. It is a hot day, on this particular Tuesday in my hometown of Zimmi in the Soro Gbema Chiefdom of Sierra Leone. There has been a gentle, fast rain shower, the kind of rain that does not drench, does not create potholes and potto-potto muddiness to be avoided as one walks or bikes or rides on an okada. It is the good kind of rainfall, bringing much needed relief from the heat, and it makes a person kn...

Yet Another Cut

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