Stories from the NHS frontline
BREAKING & MENDING: A Junior Doctor’s Stories Of Compassion And Burnout Profile Books/Wellcome Collection, £12.99
THE medic-turnedauthor is such an established literary concept that at this rate creative writing will soon appear on the medical school syllabus. Doctors, surgeons, nurses and midwives have shared their insights – by turn shocking, heartbreaking and hilarious – into a world once witnessed by others only in their times of medical need.
Now Breaking & Mending by psychiatrist-turned-award-winning writer Joanna Cannon joins the close-to-buckling medical memoir shelf.
Like many such books, this is a powerful hymn to the NHS and to the dedication of so many of its workers. But it is frank, not only about the incredible strain under which so many of those workers care for their patients, but also about the lack of compassion with which they sometimes treat both themselves and their colleagues.
Cannon, unlike many of the genre’s practitioners, is already a hugely successful novelist; The Trouble With Goats And Sheep was a 2016 bestseller.And her first foray into non-fiction is written with compassion, frankness and beautifully chosen words.
The book opens with Cannon, then a junior doctor in A&E, in crisis.After months of gradually sinking under the strain of the job, she can cope no more and takes refuge behind a flimsy A&E curtain, hands shaking, eyes swimming. Her dream career had become “the worst kind of living hell”.
Reviews with supervisors offered occasional opportunities to ask for help yet she felt she had to claim she was “fine”. Burnout, she observes, is an “unlikely phrase”, suggesting something loud and difficult to miss whereas in most cases it is “quiet and remains unseen”.
In desperation, she takes two weeks of leave, spending every waking minute of them reading for pleasure, filling her “mind with other people’s words and thoughts”, then returns to the hospital to begin a planned rotation in psychiatry.
Here, she learns her supposed weaknesses might be a strength. Her instinct for spending time talking with patients is a neat fit
now that her purpose is to unpick their stories. Psychiatry is “her landscape”.
Cannon’s route into medicine was far from typical. She left school at 15 with one O-level. It was only in her 30s, after a series of jobs including delivering pizza and selling perfume, that she completed A-levels and began her training. She was –and is – a “wild card”.
She left her psychiatry job in 2015 to write full time.And here, through a series of vignettes – her experiences and those of her patients (nonidentifiable composites) – we see the pressure on resources, staff and patients that no doubt informed her decision to leave.
Cannon recalls the junior doctor discharged after a mental health crisis who goes on to hang himself; she recalls sitting with a dying patient and her parents during her final minutes; she recalls a typical A&E shift when, after 12 hours with nothing to eat or drink, her request for time to run and grab a biscuit from the closing canteen was met with disgust by her consultant.
Through the book, we meet several of the patients who most deeply affected her. She terms them Kodak moments and, since she learns something from each, she concludes that she would change nothing.
This is a book of stories.And Cannon tells them very well.