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To anyone who says "it's not brain surgery," presupposing the rarefied genius of the world's scalpel-wielders, Gabriel Weston might like to have a word.

"Anybody dogged and determined can be a surgeon," she says with her classic British self-deprecation. "I think if you're bloody-minded enough, you can learn anything."

One does get the impression that the bloody-minded Dr. Weston determines everything winningly well, including interviews. Though she says she's discombobulated from jetlag, she doesn't appear remotely lethargic, and is as vibrant a raconteuse in person as she is in her first book, Direct Red: A Surgeon's Story.

The 38-year-year-old ear, nose and throat surgeon is sitting in the Toronto offices of Random House on a soggy afternoon worthy of her native London, where she lives with her husband (a vascular physician) and two young children.

She has the delicate complexion and busy blue eyes of a moor-side Brontë heroine and the slender, sinewy build of the caffeinated urban careerist.

To the British media, Dr. Weston explained that she manages to stay slim with a combination of swimming and neuroses. In fact, she references her neuroses with a restless frequency that is both charming and, well, neurotic. When she tells me about her kids, she skips the proud mommy routine: "They're really not adorable at all. One is actually the main challenge of my life, but I'm probably, like, a toxic mother - highly strung and neurotic."

Direct Red, released last month in Canada, is spiked with more code-blue cliffhangers than a season of Grey's Anatomy. Dissecting the blood-spattered, ego-addled world of surgery, Dr. Weston writes about getting drenched in her patients' blood right down to her underwear; about sawing cadavers like wood and then cleaning severed legs of "ancient, desiccated feces"; about how surgeons strive to be saviours, sometimes serving instead as executioners. But what is most compelling about this short book is not its wince-inducing gore, but the often discomfiting candour of its storyteller.

Dr. Weston depicts operating rooms, neon-lit stages to "the pageant of loss," set to bad FM radio, gurneys hauled by doctors sometimes more concerned with rescuing their own reputations than the lives of their patients, and how surgeons may experience a sort of quiet elation at discovering a sneaky cancer - a professional coup to the physician (but clearly not such a festive moment if you're the one prone on the operating table).

"From the outside, it would be nice to think of surgeons as better, but they're not," she says. "You have the whole spectrum of human flaws in the operating theatre as much as you do anywhere else." Dr. Weston is as keen to excise surgeons of their grandiosity as she is to deflate her own talents. With a degree in English literature, she didn't entertain any "I want to be a doctor" fantasies as a kid, she says, because she was "crap at science.

"Give me the simplest bit of mental arithmetic and I wouldn't be able to do it," she says. "You know how it is with your parents. They tell you what you're good at. When I was a kid, they said, 'You're good at English and languages, what a shame you're really thick at sciences.' " But despite her supposed scientific handicap, she felt chronically drawn to all things medical.

"When I was doing my English degree, I'd just go and see my GP a lot, even though there was nothing wrong with me. I was that nightmare, high-strung, 20-year-old girl who's always at the doctor with a headache she thinks is a brain tumour." The life-shifting moment came when she tagged along to see a friend's father operate. "I remember thinking, 'This is the most exciting thing I've ever seen.' "

She still talks about her profession with the same kind of childlike exuberance: "Surgery is just one of those things that makes you feel fizzy." About the presurgery anticipation, she says excitedly, wiggling impatiently in her chair: "I really properly get itchy hands. I really, really, really do. I can't wait to get in the operating theatre. When I was 25, I'd go down to the ER and there would be someone with appendicitis or something, and I'd literally be rubbing my hands together."

But with the knife-happy adrenalin comes a constant terror: "The fear is that I'm going to mess it up. Killing someone is really at the far end of that," she says. The main fear, she admits, is that she'll make a mistake, let herself down and look foolish in front of her peers. That the British call the operating room a theatre is fitting: Surgery is a high-stakes performance complete with sweaty-palm jitters, glaring lights, judgmental lookers-on and a spotlight-hungry star.

Dr. Weston now only practises part-time ("I have a genteel two-days-a-week job now, none of that up all night, running down the halls drama," she says). She's opted to focus her energies on parenthood. In Direct Red she writes about a surgeon's most important challenge: "This awareness of one's own limits can prove more life-saving than any knife."

Her decision to focus on her children seems an acknowledgment of her own. "I had one child and carried on. I could basically pretend that I didn't have a child," she says with startling honesty, "but I was overwhelmed by the second child. Having kids somehow kicks something out of you." However, in true alpha-female fashion, a month after resigning from her full-time job, Dr. Weston signed a book deal: "It was like I could take my tricky ego from one arena and stick it into a new one. ...

"The true test," she continues, the textbook Type A who looks upon every fresh professional or personal move as an exam she intends to ace, "will be when all the publicity dies out and all the fuss is over. That will be the time to see how I cope."

With that concluding thought tidily sewn up, her publicist pops in and hurries Dr. Weston out the door to her next interview - her next winsome performance.