Your Life In My Hands - a Junior Doctor's Story - by Rachel Clarke

This book was quite a straightforward read, as the writing is very competent, so it flows well. Some tighter editing would have been helpful, as with many modern books, as there is some repetition.

There are two strands to the book, as is hinted by the blurb. The big one is the discussion of the NHS and its decline resulting from the lack of funding. I was not uninterested in this topic, but I did feel that the message was rather repetitive. The author’s passionate concern about the NHS shine through and I guess her spelling it out in such detail was inevitable.

The other thread was the description of her medical work. This was the part that I really enjoyed, finding a lot of it quite emotional. Thinking back on the book, the medical stories are the part that will stay with me.

What I'm reading ...

I have started Your Life In My Hands - a Junior Doctor's Story by Rachel Clarke, my next book club book. Here’s the blurb:

How does it feel to be spat out of medical school into a world of pain, loss and trauma that you feel wholly ill-equipped to handle?
To be a medical novice who makes decisions which - if you get them wrong - might forever alter, or end, a person's life?
To toughen up the hard way, through repeated exposure to life-and-death situations, until you are finally a match for them?
In this heartfelt, deeply personal account of life as a junior doctor in today's health service, former television journalist turned doctor, Rachel Clarke, captures the extraordinary realities of ordinary life on the NHS front line. From the historic junior doctor strikes of 2016 to the 'humanitarian crisis' declared by the Red Cross, the overstretched health service is on the precipice, calling for junior doctors to draw on extraordinary reserves of what compelled them into medicine in the first place - and the value the NHS can least afford to lose - kindness.
Your Life in My Hands is at once a powerful polemic on the systematic degradation of Britain's most vital public institution, and a love letter of optimism and hope to that same health service and those who support it. This extraordinary memoir offers a glimpse into a life spent between the operating room and the bedside, the mortuary and the doctors' mess, telling powerful truths about today's NHS frontline, and capturing with tenderness and humanity the highs and lows of a new doctor's first steps onto the wards in the context of a health service at breaking point - and what it means to be entrusted with carrying another's life in your hands.