Your Life In My Hands: A Junior Doctor's Story

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The course of my life is in Your power; deliver me from the power of my enemies and from my persecutors. Many always dream of being a nurse or a doctor specialising in specific areas of medicine, but no-one prepares you for the real life on the front line that is looking after patients and dealing with the most traumatic moments that only a doctor can experience. Every patient is different, not every patient is understanding some can be rather rude. We ask a lot of doctors and what they have to except. Rachel’s accounts in her book are very eloquent and her writing style means that she comes across as though she there with you talking directly you. Just like a doctor in fact. My times are in Thy hand; Deliver me from the hand of mine enemies, and from them that persecute me. The very fact that doctors would abandon their patients to go on strike was enough to highlight their desperation and fierce opposition towards the proposed contractual changes. Medical professionals place patients at the heart of their work and leaving them vulnerable to deterioration in their absence is a huge risk that no doctor would willingly take. Yet, driven by the cardinal threat to their capacity to continue providing the best care to their patients, junior doctors went on strike for the first time in NHS history. To me, this is sufficient to evince the enormity of the political decisions that were being made at the time. It shows that doctors felt that the long-term costs of not voicing their concerns would far outweigh the harm that their momentary absence would cause.

Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers(15) My times are in thy hand-- i.e., the vicissitudes of human life (LXX. and Vulg. have "my destinies") are under Divine control, so that the machinations of the foe cannot prevail against one whom God intends to deliver. For the expression comp. 1Chronicles 29:30, "the times that went over him," Isaiah 33:6. This book has also allowed me to see that medicine is essentially inseparable from politics. No matter how much doctors wish to be independent, they still fall under the subjugation of government bureaucracy and their choices are still influenced by political imperatives. Powerful, uplifting and even reassuring . . . Clarke's tone is more intimate, much of the book written at night when she couldn't sleep for fear, fury and frustration - the last two she attributes largely to the inadequacies and lies of politicians. Rage lurks beneath many paragraphs as she lambasts the delays in decisions, and the "number theatre" of statistics. You get the sense of someone trying to remain calm and reasoned, often on the verge of being overcome . . . superb -- Madeleine Bunting ― Guardian 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.

Who would I recommend this book to?

It is a well-known fact, referred to in Rachel Clarke’s eloquent and moving account of her life as a junior doctor, that candidates at interviews for medical school should never say that they want to help people. Instead, you must use a code — talk about wanting to make a difference, or of finding medicine and disease fascinating, or your love of using your hands. I love how Clarke reminisces the years of her childhood and youth, when her father would bring the entire family to visit his patients at the cottage hospital where he worked. Such an act of compassion filled the wards with a palpable warmth and was especially uplifting for patients who had been forsaken by their families. Her father’s temperament and compassion towards his patients became a guiding beacon for Clarke’s own journey into medicine. I truly admire Clarke’s patient-centred approach to her work and like her, I aspire to be a doctor who can make patients feel loved and understood. This memoir of the first wave of Covid will, I predict, be read a century from now as one of the best eyewitness accounts of what happened in the nation's wards in 2020. But it is no less important that it be read now, as a riveting, heart-wrenching testimony from the front line . . . Clarke writes with grace and empathy about her patients and colleagues . . . A must-read -- Matthew D'Ancona, Tortoise Media

In the long run, without proper measures to ease the burden on overstretched doctors, patient care will be severely compromised. Not only that, doctors and nurses can succumb to mental health problems precipitated by stress, anxiety and guilt at not being able to deliver the quality of care that their patients deserve. While it is no fault of the individual, it can seem to some doctors like a personal failure. Clarke is a superb storyteller as well as a clear-eyed polemicist . . . she writes with such compassion and humanity that you feel you are in the room . . . Clarke is certainly on the side of the angels and she has produced much more than a snapshot. Breathtaking is a beautiful, blistering account of a key moment in our history. If I were Boris Johnson, I wouldn't want to read it -- Christina Patterson ― Sunday Times My times are in thy hand: Deliver me from the hand of mine enemies, and from them that persecute me.Breathtaking is a scorching corrective to any suggestion that the pandemic is a hoax and that empty hospital corridors imply deserted intensive care units . . . Written at pace as "a kind of nocturnal therapy" on sleepless nights, Clarke's book has all the rawness of someone still working in the eye of the storm ― Mirror I am a junior doctor. It is 4 a.m. I have run arrest calls, treated life-threatening bleeding, held the hand of a young woman dying of cancer, scuttled down miles of dim corridors wanting to sob with sheer exhaustion, forgotten to eat, forgotten to drink, drawn on every fibre of strength that I possess to keep my patients safe from harm.’