Catch Your Breath: The Secret Life of a Sleepless Anaesthetist

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Catch Your Breath is absolutely hilarious and really helped to lessen some of my health and hospital anxiety that I’ve really struggled with for years. It seems that he wanted to be the next Adam Kay, with his funny patient stories and awkward situations, but that for me didn't really hit.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. This book managed to find the right balance between being funny and light-hearted but also sharing some of the upsetting and distressing elements of the job, including working through the COVID-19 crisis. This follows Ed Patrick from his time at Aberdeen Uni studying medicine, to his eventual decision to become an anaesthetist.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. 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. Yes it is a memoir that hits you at moments like a hammer blow, yes it will upset you, cause you to reflect, but also it will have you rolling around laughing so hard you will need tissues to wipe away tears of laughter. What struck me most was the realization that their contribution extends far beyond the operating room. Ed weaves his humanity through this, with frequent and tender references to his family, in particular his parents which leaves you in no doubt as to the man he is.

Funny , honest , at times brutal , but always a great insight to the running of the NHS and how the staff have to deal with whatever is put in front of them. The main difference between this book and any of Adam Kay's is that the end of this one was set during the COVID-19 pandemic. 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. takes you on a captivating journey through the life of an Anesthetist, shedding light on a role often overlooked in the medical world. This is a human, mature, yet humorous account of life as a junior medic, in perhaps the most testing of times.Catch Your Breath moved me from laughter, to moments of remembrance and gave me a whole new appreciation of what working in a hospital is like. A funny and well-written book, that is a necessary read to understand what really went on in the ICUs. Nevertheless, I have deep, deep appreciation for all health care workers during the pandemic; he does give some sense of how frustrating it has been, but if you know or follow any hcws, this won't be new to you, though.

It seems like he was going for a "funny doctor" kind of vibe, but with the countless anecdotes, all about him doing something awkward or being insecure about himself, all he's done is convince me that he's just not that good of a doctor. Being prepared and ready for the worst case scenario is a reoccurring theme throughout the book, because things don't always go smoothly, keeping a cool head in a stressful scenario! A dose of insight into life on the hospital wards during the pandemic, while injecting hope that we will all get through this.Throughout the book, as I have seen in many others, are scattered complaints about how underfunded and unmodernized the NHS is, along with compliments for it, of course, as it seems the author still has a job he would like to keep. However, I HIGHLY recommend this book to people who like medical memoirs but aren’t anaesthetists themselves. Hard hitting and hilariously funny, not quite the combination youd expect from a behind the scenes tale of an anaesthetist!

Ed Patrick frequently describes feeling helpless in the novel whilst his patients rely on him and sometimes you cannot completely rely on facts, especially during moments of emotional hardship in families after losing a loved one. Medical memoirs always feel like home to me and I really miss my time working at the hospital; this book felt so familiar to me. Accessible entry: Steep internal staircase consisting of 20 steps leading to the basement where The Lower Hall space is located. There is some humour in the second half - however Covid deaths are too raw and sad for them to be anything but.Patrick's story, told with sincerity and a touch of humor, makes this book engaging and enlightening. 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. Would it be boring, too technical, dark and creepy (some people may not even wake up from the deep sleep). A quietly funny and self-deprecating read covering some of the many stories from a newly qualified doctor, beginning in his medical student days through to the more recent Covid-19 era. 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.