Some careers are measured in promotions, awards or years of service. A medical career is often measured differently in people, emergencies, difficult decisions, unexpected recoveries, heartbreaking losses and moments so strange that they remain vivid decades later.
In There is a Bomb in My Vagina: Short Medical Stories from 45 Years in Practice, Craig Troop, M.D. opens the door to a remarkable medical career spanning more than four and a half decades. Beginning in emergency medicine and later moving into anesthesiology, Dr. Troop encountered thousands of patients between 1979 and 2025. What stayed with him, however, were not simply diagnoses or procedures. They were the human stories behind them.
And some of those stories are almost impossible to forget.
The book’s unforgettable title comes from an emergency-room encounter with a 66-year-old woman who arrived by ambulance insisting that her gynecologist had planted an explosive device inside her. Even the EMS crew initially appeared to believe her story. What followed was a bizarre combination of medical investigation, psychiatric evaluation, family confusion and the kind of unexpected humor that repeatedly appears throughout Dr. Troop’s memoir.
But the book is far more than a collection of unusual hospital stories.
Dr. Troop also recalls moments when medicine became terrifyingly serious. He writes about critically ill children, cardiac arrests, fatal surgical emergencies and a teenage accident whose images never left him. In one extraordinary account, he describes meeting a survivor of the 1985 Delta Flight 191 crash near Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, a passenger who, remarkably, walked away without a scratch.
These dramatic stories reveal something medical television often misses: doctors do not simply move from one emergency to the next untouched. Some experiences remain with them for years.
That is also why humor plays such an important role in the book. Dr. Troop describes how medical professionals sometimes laugh at situations outsiders might find shocking. It is not necessarily because they lack compassion. Rather, humor can become a way of coping with repeated exposure to suffering, pressure and death. His stories move easily from heartbreaking to hilarious, sometimes within the same chapter.
As the memoir progresses, another side of Dr. Troop emerges. He reflects on faith, mortality, relationships, professional humility and the lessons he accumulated over a lifetime of medicine. Perhaps his most memorable philosophy is summarized in four simple rules: Show Up, Do Good Work, Shut Up and Go Home. Behind the humor is serious advice about reliability, competence, communication and maintaining a life beyond work.
There is a Bomb in My Vagina may attract attention with its provocative title, but what keeps the reader turning pages is something deeper.
It is the opportunity to see medicine through the eyes of someone who spent 45 years inside it, witnessing people at their funniest, frightened, most vulnerable and sometimes most courageous.
For readers fascinated by true medical stories, human behavior, dark humor and the unpredictable moments that shape a lifetime, Craig Troop, M.D.’s collection offers a candid journey behind the hospital doors.
Because after thousands of patients, some stories simply refuse to be forgotten.
Available Now On Amazon: https://a.co/d/01DIRVsP
