Holding My Breath ★★★★
Anne Biccard
Jacana Media
Once again Dr Anne Biccard has shown that some of the best stories are found in a hospital’s emergency department.
Her first book, the bestselling Saving a Stranger’s Life: The Diary of an Emergency Room Doctor, chronicles her experiences between March and August 2020, from when Covid-19 hit through SA’s first wave of infections and subsequent lockdown.
In Holding My Breath: Further Exploits of an ER Doctor, Biccard picks up where she left off, taking the reader further into the eye of the storm through the second, third and fourth waves of Covid-19 and the discovery of the Omicron variant.
The stress, trauma, grief and PTSD brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic didn’t offer much in the way of positive opportunity for frontline health workers and doctors. And yet, it offered the emergency room doctor an opportunity — and theme — to string together a collection of stories she’d been penning down for years.
“I started writing five years ago and sort of put the stories together like a diary to make more of a story,” Biccard tells me when we meet for coffee during a break from her shift in the emergency department of the hospital where she works.
“It’s quite a cathartic thing to do, to write down all the strange things you see every day. Covid-19 came along and sort of gave me a theme to put stuff together. Otherwise, it would have seemed like a bunch of single stories.”
Her stories evolved from her trying to write a handbook for young doctors. In her attempt to offer advice gleaned over more than 30 years working as an ER doctor, she found herself wandering into the realm of storytelling. While she follows the timeline presented by Covid-19, many of her stories glance back at her experiences over the years. The end result is a formula that makes for a perfectly entertaining read.
Biccard recalls a stint working in a mortuary at the beginning stages of her career when she considered forensic pathology as a specialty. Following the death of a man who supposedly drowned in a Johannesburg lake, she uncovered a ring of people who had been trading illegally in organs from the mortuary for years.
Then there’s the man who comes in concerned about the fact that his nipple had migrated from his chest to his armpit during the night. In all his years of drug use, he says, his nipple has never moved.
“People ask me how I make all this stuff up and I’m, like, I’m not making it up — it’s all true!”
Between the downright hilarious — and often absurd — encounters she shares with the reader there are also deeply moving and heart-wrenching stories — the type that form the hardest part of her job: giving people bad news. The times she loses patients to “Grim”, her constant competitor.
“Sometimes I feel like I have seen it all. But even after 30 years I still learn something new every day. And sometimes the universe seems to be beautiful, despite the gruesome twists of fate.”
These beautiful moments are the instances in which she “gets it right” and she scores a point against Grim, managing to save a patient’s life.
Biccard has a talent for taking a medical situation and explaining it in layman’s terms so that the reader not only understands but gets it — the science, the trauma, the victories and all the nuance, frustration and humour in between.
And just when you think you’re reading the diary of a superhuman who very calmly and collectedly just stopped a woman from bleeding to death during a rampant nose bleed, she shares her candid feelings: “Perhaps I need to lace my tea with Valium, to make me feel as calm as I pretend to be”.
Click here to buy a copy of Holding my Breath.
