Life Support: Diary of an ICU Doctor on the Frontline of the Covid Crisis

Having lived/ survived the experience of hospitalisation by Covid, it was interesting to read the perspective of doctors who found themselves thrown into the melee, and having to reinvent processes and practices in order to keep people alive. A powerful book.

This book has helped me make sense of what we have all just been through and continue to endure.I walked past the hospital often on my daily lockdown exercise and thought often of what was behind the shuttered windows.It is so well written in the way that he reveals himself so honestly as a person AND as a doctor in what truly feels like a war situation with all its courage and chaos. There is a careful balance of the medical technical terms, neither too academic nor simplistic.Lovely humour and care for the team and the patients with stories told with consideration and discretion. Never feels gratuitous or self serving.Loved it and on finishing it ,had it ripped from my hands by others eager to read it.

Gives an understanding of what our hospitals have been through and the effect upon staff. Written in an understandable and human way with lots of warmth.

This book is beautifully written. It not only gave a thoughtful and intelligent insight of the covid crisis from the heart of a covid crisis center in the NHS. But it also took me on a roller coaster of emotions. It made me laugh, cry and feel actual relief - all the more real as it was written about genuine patients and the real problems NHS staff faced in the height of the first wave. Not easy read emotionally, but even better for it!

I don't usually read this type of book as I find that many medics are not able to write for a layperson, in language that is both understandable and engaging. Jim Down has proved my prejudice incorrect. This is such an honest, engaging memoir that I would advise everyone to read if you want to understand the impact of Covid on both the doctors and other staff who care for us and gain an insight into the system in which they are working. I am finding it a page-turner and compulsive read. This is because Jim Down is a fine writer who allows the reader into his head and to experience the ICU from the inside looking out. I can't wait to see if Prof. Down turns his hand to fiction at some point.

Staggering in it's honesty and so well written. I feel a better person for having read it and all "deniers" ought to read this book.Moving and astonishing. Having had my gallbladder removed, a new knee and a new hip in the last 2 years I was already full of admiration for the NHS but now, my level of respect is through the roof.

There's a been a flurry recently of doctors baring all in the manner of AJ Cronin's 1939 book The Citadel. Henry Marsh's Do No Harm is an exemplar of the genre; Adam Kay's This Is Going To Hurt is best seen as a lamentable footnote. Publicity shots for Jim Down's book show him in a back garden, incongruously attired in theatre scrubs, looking handsomely haunted, a far from happy bunny caught in the media spotlight. So, one wonders what prompted him to commit pen to paper. Perhaps his interviews in the UCLH ICU with the BBC's Fergus Walsh give a clue. Jim Down came across as suffering almost as much as his COVID patients, and this clearly wasn't something put on for the camera. Life Support is brutally honest and clinically accurate, but with occasional lapses into self-protective gallows humour. Writing the diary must have been cathartic and I'm not surprised readers have been left in tears. Making sense of suffering is all part of the healing process and Jim Down does that pretty well.

I loved this book. it reads with the pace of a thriller and is utterly engrossing.The author recounts with candour, humour and humanity the inner workings of an ITU department as it prepares for the terrifying wave of illness and death bought to London by COVID and its aftermath.He explains using real life examples how individual Doctors and Nurses coped with extraordinary bravery, self sacrifice and empathy towards their patients often paying high personal costs.I didn't want to the book to end and I will be looking out for any more books by this author in the future.