It Could Be Worse: The Social and Medical Adventures of a Young Doctor Traveling to Africa

It Could Be Worse chronicles the personal adventures and challenges of an American anesthesiologist who resigns his promising career at a university hospital and travels to an African mission to work as a medical volunteer.

Dr. Franklin Cobos shares his incredible life-altering journey from serving as an Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology at a Nebraska hospital to teaching and providing anesthesia as a volunteer in the Republic of Chad, Africa. In a moving account packed with emotional highs and lows, Dr. Cobos details how he gathered the courage to leave a profession where he felt unfulfilled and learned to adapt his Western medical skills to a decidedly different culture. From treating pediatric malaria patients to working in operating rooms that reached 130 degrees, Dr. Cobos describes a medical mission like no other. When a newborn baby dies after his mother dies because there is no neonatal intensive care or nursery or lactation consultants, Dr. Cobos must learn to face the fact that sometimes giving his best is just not good enough.

As Dr. Cobos radically changes how he works as a physician, he soon discovers he is living the life he is meant to live.

Dr. Franklin V. Cobos was an Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology at the University of Nebraska Medical Center when he resigned to teach and provide anesthesia as a volunteer doctor in such developing countries as New Guinea and Kenya. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska, when he is not volunteering abroad.