Catch Your Breath: The Secret Life of a Sleepless Anaesthetist

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Because, in the real medical life, which involves hospital and night shifts and anaesthesia, there is nothing like that. From the 'Foreword - A Doctor's Note' I knew I was going to love this book because I felt like I was reading something by Adam Kay (and I have read and loved all of his books). The thing is, whilst we all lived through it to one degree or another, unless we were frontline healthcare workers like Ed Patrick, we didn’t really live through it at all.

Comedians' Surgery podcast - where I interview comedians about their health and medical stories, with some features and games thrown in.Written in short snippets of cases, experiences, and daily life this book was super easy to read and would be a great book to dip in and out of if you're short on time. Ed also smashes that rule - this is a beautifully written book which is also incredibly funny, with regular laugh out loud moments. Hilariously funny, moving and truly insightful, it follows Ed's journey from bewildered medical student in Aberdeen to unflinching anaesthetist on the NHS frontline. Nothing in their training could prepare them for the onslaught of the loss of life, the relentless waves of admissions, lack of governmental support and the terrible knowledge that there was little they could do!

I devoured this book in one go, resulting in a very late night/ early morning, but I couldn't put it down. Full of humour, honest and unfettered emotion touching not only on the training that junior doctors must go through but how the NHS faired during the covid pandemic. The rest of the book describes with detail and humour what it is to be a junior doctor and, latterly, an anaesthetist. This book follows Ed from medical school, through rotations as a junior doctor to training as an anaesthetist. Accessible entry: Steep internal staircase consisting of 20 steps leading to the basement where The Lower Hall space is located.

Of course, this book isn’t solely based around the pandemic, though the chapters that are show us the harsh realities of life on the frontline. I loved reading the little insights into life as a Doctor and how Anaesthetists are vital to all different areas of medicine and not just for attending to patients in surgery. If anyone needs a reality check at just how much the NHS staff are under appreciated, this book will do it.

The story takes us through Ed's training which had some side splittingly funny anecdotes, his rotations as a junior doctor though to Covid hitting. This is a book of 2 halves - the first laugh out loud funny, with Ed recounting his medical training with witty cynicism and dry humour. As a memoir, Catch your Breath has an impressive number of dialogues which are so vivid and smart and hilarious that I´ve caught myself just laughing on my own more than once. Yet still they got up and carried on, what other choice did they have and they found humour and a connection with humanity wherever they could.

In the second half of the book we get a glimpse into life in early COVID times as an anesthesiologist in the UK. The book taught me that despite this, at times doctors do need to detach themselves from their emotions yet that is a much harder task than it seems, so being mentally strong is so important. I didn’t expect that being an anaesthetist in a pandemic would leave me outside my front door naked, or indeed that I’d be telling this story to readers. I have listened to some of Ed’s podcasts, so know him for his comedic slant on life and his medical career.

After the years the whole country has dealt with thanks to the Covid pandemic, to hear it through the words on someone who was on the frontline was quite something. It reminded me that humour is the greatest tonic we have, that at it darkest it is the most healing, the more perverse, the more irrelevant the funnier it can be. So to all those that railed against nurses doing dance video’s on Tik Tok, for those that blamed medical teams for cancelling surgery, closing clinics, take a step back and take a long deep look into your souls and acknowledge the debt we owe these people.of 'This Is Going To Hurt', there are mentions of patients he encounters from paediatrics through to the geriatrics, as he works in challenging NHS conditions to do his work effectively; that being, keeping people alive.