All That Moves Us | Book Review

It’s been a minute since a book impressed an expansive feeling of gratitude in me. (I love books, and I am of course grateful for their general existence – but this is a more acute, unmissable kind of feeling towards a book that I read at the perfect time.) Jay Wellons, a paediatric neurosurgeon, shares

“Sh*t Bag” – a YA novel about ‘ostomies and IBD, for everyone

A few months ago, I was thinking about how there is so little fiction about people living with (things like) stomas. In my line of work, we often perform life-saving procedures – ileostomies, tracheostomies, splenectomies, amputations – and afterwards people go back into the world with their lives forever changed. Saved, but changed.  In an

Small by small [A book review]

Popular though they may be, there has often been something missing from the overseas medical memoirs and dramas I so hungrily consume. Rosamund Kendal’s Karma Suture and Angina Monologues are two of very few novels that hit the nail on the gritty metaphorical head; but then she went and became a popular author who branched

Book Review: Girls of Little Hope

The premise seems familiar enough: three girls go into the woods, and only two return. But therewith ends the similarities between Girls of Little Hope (Sam Beckbessinger, Dale Halvorsen), and a dozen other horrors/thrillers.  Initially reading like a missing person/murder mystery-type thriller, a sense of foreboding slowly sets in, until the full horror – and

Stitched Up: Stories of Life and Death from a Prison Doctor [Book Review]

Immediately after ComServe, when I was unemployed for – gasp! – a whole week, I considered applying to a job as a prison GP. (I did not, because a locum opportunity came along that morphed into something semi-permanent, and other opportunities fell by the wayside for a while.) “Offender healthcare occupies the grey zone between

Beyond Pride Month: Five Proud Books

This post is inspired by The Secret Life of Albert Entwistle by Matt Cain, a delightful book I had the opportunity to read and review recently.  Pride month is over, the stores have taken down their rainbow banners, and companies have reverted from their ROYGBIV-inspired logos. But that doesn’t mean PRIDE is over, or that

Mini-Reviews: Medical Non-Fiction

I like to read medical non-fiction. Not textbooks, but the kind of book a layperson with an interest can read, and someone in a medical profession may also enjoy, and learn from. There are three important things I look for in these books: Contributes to the non-medical reader’s understanding/interest of their health and/or bodies in

That One Patient [Book Review]

I told myself I would remember her forever – the first patient I lost. I was just a third year medical student, and really, it was my team doing the looking after, not me. I’ve forgotten her name by now, but I still remember her.  I initially resisted reading Ellen de Visser’s That One Patient

A Fullness of Uncertain Significance [Book Review]

If a medical doctor pens a memoir, I will read it. I don’t care if they are a surgeon (uneasy relationship), a physician (intimidatingly book smart), or an anaesthetist (well that’s pretty close to home). Even if nobody else reads your book, I will be your audience of one. But A Fullness of Uncertain Significance

Prescription Comedy: An Unlikely Antidote to Physician Burnout

Pranathi Kondapaneni, MD, author of Prescription Comedy: An Unlikely Antidote To Physician Burnout, studied medicine some time before me, but our stories are not so different. Although on an entirely different continent, and an entirely different cultural background, her experience with burnout resonates clearly with me. While her writing somewhat lacks prosaism (and has an