Melissa Yi, also known as Dr. Melissa Yuan-Innes, studied emergency medicine at McGill University in Montreal. She was so shocked by the patients crammed into the waiting area, and the examining rooms without running water, that she began to contemplate murder. And so she created Dr. Hope Sze, the resident who could save lives and fight crime. She appeared on CBC Radio’s Ontario Morning and recently had so many print interviews that an addiction services counsellor said, “I see you in the newspaper more often than I see you in the emergency room.”
Dr. Melissa Yuan-Innes applied to medical school mostly because she wanted to save lives, but also because she’s nosy. Medicine is a fascinating and frustrating window into other people’s lives. She shares her sometimes painful, occasionally hilarious stories in The Medical Post, Chicken Soup for the Soul, and in her essay collections The Most Unfeeling Doctor in the World, FIfty Shades of Grey’s Anatomy, and Broken Bones.
As Melissa Yuan, she writes children’s and middle-grade books for ages ranging from kindergarten through middle-school.
Doctor-wise, Melissa has worked as far north as Ivujivik, Quebec also the northernmost village in a Canadian province. Nowadays she stays closer to home, running codes in Eastern Ontario. She’s cheerfully married to her high school sweetheart, with two loud and loveable children and a Rottweiler shepherd. She loves stories, yoga, blading, sustainable fashion, laughter, intelligence, and random craziness.
