Bedside Reading

Send us Fan MailThis week contains International Women's Day on March 8th and when I started talking to Benjamin Black about hsi stunning book about his time working for Medecins sans frontiers (MSF) in Sierra Leone it was clear this was going to be the right conversation to mark today.I was blown away by Benjamin's writing, the insight into a medical world I'd never encountered and by his kindness, compassion and warmth which comes across just as much in his writing as it did when I spoke to him.Follow Benjamin on Twitter here https://twitter.com/BenjamBlack

Send us Fan MailRebecca Wait's fourth novel I'm sorry you feel that way is out in paperback on March 2nd.  Described by i-news as "one of the richest explorations of family dysfunction I’ve read", this is a fabulously funny and moving story of a family in all its shades of dysfunctionality.  It made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me think.  It's a brilliant read and there's just so much in here to reflect on and discuss. I loved the characters and the non chronological timeline which reveals just a little bit more of the story as we go.  Rebecca and I talk about the idea that every sibling grows up in a different family and we consider intergenerational trauma and whether holding onto the phrase that "difficulty makes people difficult" enables us to feel empathy for characters we might consider repugnant.  I was especially engaged by Rebecca's portrayals of mental illness vs wellness in several characters and the discussions around "labels" and whether they are helpful or at times horribly stigmatising and reductionist.  Her scenes of the "unravelling  of Hanna" and  way she writes about the fine liminal space between sanity and madness is some of the most effective fictionalisation of  psychosis I have ever read. 

Send us Fan MailWelcome to Series 4 of Bedside ReadingIt is a pleasure and a privilege to welcome the one and only Dr Kathryn Mannix to talk about her phenomenal book With the End in Mind  which may well be the book I've most ever recommended to registrars, colleagues and students.I tried hard not to end up going all fan girl on her but it was hard work to hold it all in, she really is one of my professional idols and it was a joy to record with her and listen to her wisdom.Follow Kathryn on Twitter here https://twitter.com/drkathrynmannix

Send us Fan MailToday's episode, the final one of series 3,  is all about a topic which doesn't get spoken about enough: coercive control.  We've specifically chosen to release it today, Valentine's Day, because we know that underneath the public face of all too many "happy" relationships there's a darker story at play.Victoria Cilliers' chilling memoir I survived is the story of what many of us will remember from the press as "the parachute jump attempted murder".  It is the story of a physio, a mum, a wife whose husband charmed everyone, tried to kill her and her children and did it in such a way that she, a professional, capable, intelligent woman, had no real awareness of what was happening to her.SOME USEFUL RESOURCES IF SUPPORTING PATIENTS IN A SIMILAR CONTEXThttps://www.freedomprogramme.co.uk/https://www.womensaid.org.uk/https://www.nationaldahelpline.org.uk/https://dasd.org.uk domestic abuse support specifically for doctors run by Dr Kathryn Haymanhttps://www.gov.uk/guidance/domestic-abuse-how-to-get-helphttps://www.mankind.org.uk/https://galop.org.uk/Emma specifically recommends the book Why does he do that?  by Lundy Bancroft  https://lundybancroft.com/

Send us Fan MailJoanna Nadin's The Queen of Bloody Everything, is about mothers, daughters and how we can make many choices in life but can't choose where we come from.As Edie Jones lies in a bed on the fourteenth floor of a Cambridge hospital, her adult daughter Dido tells their story, starting with the day that changed everything. That was the day Dido - aged exactly six years and twenty-seven days old - met the next door neighbours and fell in love. Because the Trevelyans were exactly the kind of family Dido dreamed of.  Normal.This book sucked me in from the start and it was so brilliant to talk to Lizz Lidbury about it. There's so much in this book: young carers, alcoholism, coercive control, what is a family? and so so much more.We talked about this article https://srh.bmj.com/content/45/1/61.abstract about reproductive controlLizz also recommended the wonderful book Man's Search for Meaning  by Viktor Frankl

Send us Fan MailA young man has stopped breathing in a supermarket toilet. A pedestrian with a nasty head injury won’t let the crew near him on a busy road. A newborn baby is worryingly silent. An addict urinates on the ambulance floor when denied a fix.This is the life of an NHS ambulance paramedic.Jake Jones has worked in the UK ambulance service for ten years: every day, he sees a dozen of the scenes we hope to see only once in a lifetime. Can You Hear Me? – the first thing he says when he arrives on the scene – is a memoir of the chaos, intensity and occasional beauty of life on the front-lines of medicine in the UK.As well as a look into dozens of extraordinary scenes – the hoarder who won’t move his collection to let his ailing father leave the house, the blood-soaked man who tries to escape from the ambulance, the life saved by a lucky crew who had been called to see someone else entirely – Can You Hear Me? is an honest examination of the strains and challenges of one of the most demanding and important jobs anyone can do.It was such a pleasure and privilege to meet Jake and talk to him as a guest and writer on the podcast

Send us Fan MailI'm so delighted that Kathleen Wenaden asked to come and talk about the beautiful, gentle evocative book with me because this has been one of my reading highlights in the past few weeks.This is a wonderful gentle record of a small world, centred around a small terraced house in the West Midlands and the diary of a year in the life of an invisible illness.The Guardian review of this book hints just slightly at the possibilities within https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/27/a-still-life-by-josie-george-review-memoir-of-a-mystery-illness. Kathleen and I talk about the fallacy of binary illness-wellness which made us reflect on another book Recovery  by Gavin Francis Follow writer Josie George here https://twitter.com/porridgebrainFollow Kathleen here https://twitter.com/kathleenwenade1

Send us Fan MailIt was a really pleasure to talk to GP and writer Sophie Harrison about her book The Cure for Good Intentions which was a BBC Radio 4 book of the week back in May 2022 and which is a fabulous insight into the storytelling world of medicine.  We talk about crossing over from arts to sciences and how the art of medicine and the storytelling is the most joyous part of what we do.Follow Sophie on twitter here https://twitter.com/sophharrison

Send us Fan MailMaggie O'Farrell is one of my favourite writers and it was such a pleasure to reread her memoir I am I am I am for todays episode when I'm discussing it with Sally Davies.We talk about where we read (in the lift at work anyone?!), what we read and why reading is so valuable to us both. We also explore  the risk-taking decisions of young brains, how common near death experiences are, how experiences shape the person we are now and how defensive we are primed to be about the NHS when sometimes care is indefensible.Follow Sally on Twitter here: https://mobile.twitter.com/sally_bobs

Send us Fan MailSet Boundaries, Find Peace had a title which both intrigued and slightly scared me.  The author Nedra Glover Tawab is something of an instagram sensation, for very good reason. It was brilliant to connect with Aukland Nurse Educator, Erin Carn-Bennett to discuss boundaries and why health professionals are often so bad at them. If you are thinking about a New Year new you type of an approach this book might just be what you need.Follow Erin on Twitter here: https://mobile.twitter.com/erincarnbennettFollow Nedra on instagram here:  https://www.instagram.com/nedratawwab/?hl=en