Direct Red

Book excerpt: In this powerful and sometimes shocking account, a surgeon reveals her experience of hospital life with rare frankness. In her mid-twenties, Gabriel Weston - an arts graduate with no scientific qualification beyond high school-level biology - decided to become a surgeon. She enrolled at night school, then went through many years of medical school and surgical training. Now in her late thirties, she has achieved her ambition and is working as a surgeon in a British hospital. "But I have never quite managed to shake off the feeling that I am an imposter,"she says. "Even when operating, it sometimes seems like I am on the outside looking in." Direct Red is the result of those observations. It is a superbly written, startlingly raw account of her experience of life in a hospital. All her own doubts, mistakes, and incongruous triumphs are faithfully recorded. It is also a revealing and at times chilling account of what she sees around her. The world of surgery is secret and closed - or was until now. Excerpt I knew that this man needed to be opened up immediately. I phoned the on-call consultant, offering to meet him in theatre. "Not so fast," he objected. "You youngsters are always in such a hurry." When he finally did concede that we needed to go to theatre, he picked up a coffee on the way. Physiology forced pace on the situation: once we cut the man open, we were confronted with the sight of the hollow cavern of the patient’s abdomen filling with blood as quickly as a basin fills with water. This consultant did not have a clue what to do; didn’t know the simplest emergency measures. He dressed his incompetence in a mannered slowness of action. It took him almost an hour to admit he wasn’t coping, at which point he shouted at the scrub nurse: "Get me another surgeon! Any surgeon!" The night taught me the paramount value of a quick response.