The man behind the mask: A life in anaesthesia and critical care
My medical career lasted forty years. The first six of those years were spent at medical school, the rest working on the NHS frontline as a hospital doctor. I don't doctor anymore. I write. I hope you enjoy reading what I have to say. If you want to know why I bothered, please read my blog!
The man behind the mask: A life in anaesthesia and critical care
My medical career lasted forty years. The first six of those years were spent at medical school, the rest working on the NHS frontline as a hospital doctor. I don't doctor anymore. I write. I hope you enjoy reading what I have to say. If you want to know why I bothered, please read my blog!
Tony plans to save the world one patient at a time, but first, he has to survive the training.
Tony McCluskey is brimming with youthful vigour and enthusiasm at the start of a six-year training programme to fight death and disease on the NHS frontline. Even though his first patient is already dead, there's a lot Tony can learn from somebody with...
Read more
Getting your patients under is an art. Bringing them back safely again is a bloody miracle.
Tony sets out on his career as an anaesthetist and soon discovers that getting his patients off to sleep and keeping them asleep until their operations are over is easier said than done. Waking them up safely afterwards with no ill effects is even harder....
Read more
“The buck stops here” isn’t just a metaphor for an NHS consultant – it’s a cardiac monitor flatlining and you're the person who will have to tell his wife.
After years serving in the trenches on the NHS frontline, Tony has been transferred to staff headquarters as a consultant anaesthetist with a special interest in the care of critically ill...
Read more
Mortuary
Every doctor is used to seeing dead bodies on a regular basis. As one of the group of ICU consultants, I was a particularly frequent visitor to the hospital mortuary. However, I saw my first dead body at the very beginning of my training on day one of week one in the Dissecting Room (DR) at medical school. Actually, I saw twenty dead bodies that day, one for each tutorial group, all lined up in neat rows lying on top of metal trolleys. It was the...
When we think of a hospital, most of us picture a general ward or perhaps the operating theatre. The reality is that there are dozens of different locations within a typical District General Hospital (DGH), some more important than others, that are necessary for high-quality patient care. There are even more specialist areas in major teaching hospitals (regional tertiary referral centres), such as cardiac surgery units, neurosurgical units, major trauma...
The Last Act, Death Scene: Take 1
You and the rest of your family are at Granny’s house, gathered around her bed. She’s dying. At ninety-two, she’s had a good innings. She’s ready to go. Her health has been declining for several years, which has been hard for Granny and you all because she was always so active. It’s her failing heart. She gets breathless on...
Who's Who and What's What: Inside NHS Hospitals