Dr. Bertina M. Hooks Has Lived More Than One Life
Dr. Bertina M. Hooks has lived more than one life.
She’s a board-certified internal medicine physician, healthcare executive, entrepreneur, speaker, coach, disability advocate, podcast host, and mother.
And in 2022, she became the patient.
A life-threatening medical crisis resulted in the loss of her right leg below the knee and changed the trajectory of a life she had spent decades building.
Now she’s telling the story.
Her forthcoming memoir, From Fire to Freedom: A Memoir of Transformation, Renewal, and Resilience, isn’t simply a book about surviving a medical crisis. It’s about what came before and what came after.
Bertina writes about becoming a physician and navigating racism and sexism in medicine. She writes about burnout, marriage and divorce, motherhood, disability, grief, faith, ambition, and the complicated business of figuring out who you are when the life you planned is no longer available to you.
I edited Bertina’s book, and, frankly, her life and her resilience took my breath away.
I love stories about strong women. I need them. I love meeting women who inspire me to be stronger through all the different times of my own life, especially the ones I didn’t see coming.
Bertina is one of those women.
But From Fire to Freedom isn’t compelling simply because Bertina has endured extraordinary things. It’s a genuinely engaging story. I wanted to know what happened next. I cared about the woman at the center of it. And I came away from the book thinking differently about resilience, reinvention, and what it means to keep building a life when the one you expected changes underneath you.
Get Dianne Pearce’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
That’s why I’m especially happy to tell you that you can read it before it’s published.
Bertina is inviting readers to join her Advance Reader Copy team ahead of the book’s September 23 release.
That means you’ll receive a free advance copy of From Fire to Freedom and be among the first people to read it.
No waiting for publication day. No buying the book. You get an early copy in exchange for being willing to read it and, if you can, share your honest thoughts about it as the book makes its way into the world.
It’s a chance to discover a new memoir before everyone else does and to get to know a pretty extraordinary woman along the way.
Because the amputation may be the dramatic event at the center of Bertina’s story, but it isn’t the thing that makes her interesting.
She is.
She’s a doctor who has been both physician and patient. A woman who has succeeded inside institutions while also confronting their limitations. A mother, entrepreneur, advocate, and leader who has had to reconsider what success means when circumstances change the question entirely.
Today, she’s using those experiences to talk about physician burnout, disability, career reinvention, leadership, and creating a meaningful life when Plan A has gone spectacularly off the rails.
You don’t have to be a physician to recognize yourself somewhere in that.
You just have to have had a life that didn’t go entirely according to plan.
Join the From Fire to Freedom ARC Team and get your free advance copy.
Originally published at https://currentwordspublishing.substack.com on September 1, 2026.
