Catch Your Breath: The Secret Life of a Sleepless Anaesthetist

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People like Ed Patrick looked to their colleagues for support, they took heart from messages left by those working outside of ICU “Good luck, ICU! You'll find more information about accessibile performances and how to book tickets in the accessibility tab below. Ed Patrick takes us on his sleep deprived, hilarious, heart breaking, journey into becoming a medical student, through his years of training and then on rotation as a junior doctor, before making the decision to begin his training to become an anaesthetist.

We have all lived a shared experience in the last two years, but for some, the essential workers, the experience was much more acute, it took all they had and more. takes you on a captivating journey through the life of an Anesthetist, shedding light on a role often overlooked in the medical world. Catch your Breath is a gut punch of a memoir by a doctor – and comedian – whose job is to keep people alive after putting them to sleep.

Ed has written and performed on BBC Radio 4, for shows “Now Wash Your Hands” and “Newsjack”, and he has also written for the Guardian about the intersection between medicine and comedy. He is cutting his teeth in anaesthetics, taking people as close to death as you can take them, and then trying to wake them up again. The writing was also really comical at times with some dark humour thrown in so if you loved This Is Going To Hurt by Adam Kay then Catch Your Breath is definitely a book for you.

I recommend it, just maybe not for someone in the medical field as they might get more out of it than I did. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. For those on the front line, in our hospitals and ambulances, our GP surgeries, we asked of them to walk towards a virus that threatened both their lives and of those they cared about.Patrick is great at writing vivid characters but I also wanted a little more substance to his environmental descriptions. A gut punch of a memoir by a doctor – and comedian – whose job is to keep people alive by putting them to sleep. On top of this it's moving without being overwrought, and insightful about the issues facing the NHS without being preachy. A great insight to the workings within a hospital and despite some of the bad days, it reminds me that we still need to keep ourselves going with a bit of humour.

This follows Ed Patrick from his time at Aberdeen Uni studying medicine, to his eventual decision to become an anaesthetist.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Was a little traumatizing to read about the inside of COVID wards, but it was traumatizing for everyone, so that’s a null point. 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. This book highlights the importance of the multidisciplinary team within medicine, the role of specialized nurses in anaesthesia and the fact that doctors rely on nurses as they often have a much closer rapport to the patients. 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.

But it's not just sleep-giving for this anaesthetist, as he navigates emergencies, patients not breathing for themselves and living with a terrifying sense of responsibility.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!