With grateful thanks to Netgalley and Serpent’s Tail for a digital copy of Breaking and Mending in return for an honest review. I was really delighted to receive a digital copy of this book as I am a great fan of Joanna Cannon’s fiction,. I believe that some novels in their subject matter, sensitive treatment of themes and understanding of humanity reveal a compassionate and loving author and I was interested in finding out more about Cannon’s experiences as a Doctor. This year I have read both Adam Kay’s books about his experiences as a junior doctor and ‘The Language of Kindness’ by Christie Watson all of which top the bestseller list as we satisfy our curiosity about the institution that is our NHS. Breaking and Mending is more akin to Watson’s book – reflective, analytical, soul-searching. The mood is more sombre without the laugh out loud humour of Kay’s works. Like Watson, Cannon reflects on the journey which brought her to become a Doctor – she started later in life having left school with very few qualifications – and describes her early days at medical school where it took her weeks to be able to look at a dead body. Cannon reveals so much of herself in this honest account – mental and physical battles, a terrible car crash and constant self-analysis about her ability to be a ‘good doctor’, finally concluding that ‘you can never be the doctor you wanted to become, because the doctor you wanted to become would not be able to survive.’.. The book paints a bleak picture of the NHS , ‘Time, money, resources and hope all run dry. The NHS is held together by the goodwill of those who work within it, but even then it will fracture, and you fall into the gaps those fractures create, and you will disappear.’ This is born out in the case of all three authors who left the service. Breaking and Mending is deeply reflective and questioning, selective in the case studies it presents, but the patient accounts included live with you for days. It is a tale of burn out, long hours, unbearable stress but endless, selfless compassion. She tells the story of early days on the wards at night when her registrar disappears off to Amsterdam – Cannon is left in charge of life and death overnight, completely unqualified and inexperienced. When she tells the consultant he turns on her. I greatly enjoyed reading, ‘Breaking and Mending’- it added another texture to my very inadequate understanding of being a doctor and yet again it left me thinking ‘WHY?’ Why does it have to be like that….

Hi everyone!
I adore this book so much! I'm currently studying medicine, and it's the first medicine-related book I've ever read, and it was a perfect match.

This is a beautiful memoir about Joanna, a doctor who decided to study later in her life, but this never stopped her from following her passion.

It deals with her journey from her first lecture, to the time she found her 'family' in psychiatry. She explores how these years shaped her into the doctor she is today and the emotional part of her job. How emotions are often ignored in the medical field because sometimes you can know the rarest of diseases but cannot find a way to cope with the death of a patient.

She talks about her first visit to the mortuary, the excitement of looking at people when you know anatomy. Learning how to talk with patients and use the right kindness. How self-doubt made her think she didn't deserve to be there but then finding motivation in patients and the desire to make even the tiniest of difference. And last but not least what inspired her to pursue psychiatry (one of the things I'd love to do as a doctor).

It is beautifully written, in fact, I highlighted entire paragraphs that are just so lovely that I want to read them again and again.

Towards the end, she says that she is afraid to deter people from following a career in medicine, but honestly, she inspired me so much and even motivated me, because I feel the same things.

"Stories bind us together, stories unite us, and we tell our stories in the hope that someone out there will listen, and we will be understood."

Thank you Netgalley and Serpent’s Tail for the ARC and thank you for reading,
Arvenig

- We should all choose our words with more care because we never know the scales with which they will be measured. - Joanna Cannon

Breaking & Mending was a fascinating insight into the life of a junior doctor. I loved reading about the different stages in Jo's career as a doctor and how she reacted during different situations. It was heartbreaking and life affirming, and it would be a pleasure to be treated by a doctor with Jo's bedside manner, you could tell from her words that she cared deeply about those patients who she mentioned in her memoir.

I think that the overall tone of the book isn't a humorous one like perhaps This is Going to Hurt, but still a must read for fans of the doctor / memoir type reads.

‘Kindness is nothing to do with wearing a uniform or stethoscope. It’s to do with being human’

This is a memoir about Joanna Cannon’s experiences as a junior doctor in the NHS. She describes everything from the very beginning of her medical career - throughout medical school, her first days as a junior doctor and her transition through to psychiatry.

I absolutely LOVED this book. It was heartbreaking, touching and extremely emotional and I flew through it. You learn about the day-to-day experiences that all of our Doctors and Nurses go through each shift, and the impact this has on their mental wellbeing. Not having enough time sleep, eat or even drink. The emotional weight that comes with trying to help each patient, when sometimes there is no solution.

I recommend everyone to read this book. It was beautifully written and the stories inside are extremely moving and will stay with me for a long time.

*I received a free review copy from the publisher in exchange for my honest unedited feedback via netgalley*

With Breaking and Mending, you get an honest, raw and personal story of one Junior doctors experiences.
I've always enjoyed medical themed books, and getting a glimpse into different careers and lives.
This book was perfect for that.
Thoughtful and well written, I found myself flying through this book and enjoying every moment of it.
I would highly recommend it.

This is a relatively short book but so incredibly overwhelming that it took me several sittings to get through it and it left me with plenty to think about.

At the heart, it’s the personal story of one person as they begin medical school and grapple with the differences between the ideology and reality of being a junior doctor. The emotional side of the job is really explored here, an area that is often forgotten or overlooked.

Cannon doesn’t avoid criticism of the system and the status quo either, to the point she expresses concerns that she’ll put people off applying for medical school! But, while the NHS is wonderful that doesn’t mean it can’t be improved and I think it’s essential to have these discussions. Burnout is a real problem and we often lose track of the individual behind the doctors (or other health professional) title. More needs to be done to ensure we don’t lose good, compassionate doctors, like Cannon, to burnout and support them to have long and fulfilling careers.

For anyone working in our healthcare system this is a must read. Despite it being a very personal account, I’m certain that many areas of it will ring true for others.

A beautifully written memoir, finished in one sitting. Memoirs are one of my fav genre of books.
It made me cry on a couple of occasions - the 38yr old father and Joan.
I do feel the last couple of chapters were a little rushed which is a shame.

Highly recommended

Joanna Cannon’s short reflections on being a junior doctor is moving, heartwarming and insightful. She depicts the wards, surgeries and even the mortuary in a way that highlights the humanity in these places.

Through short, sharp chapters, opening with a thought or anecdote from various medical professionals, Cannon talks about a number of different interactions she’s had with both patients and colleagues during her time as a medical student and also as a doctor. She jumps from one anecdote to another in seamless transitions always bringing home a message or a learning from that experience and making it relatable to her readers.

I loved hearing her talk about her patients. There is a real warmth and affection in Cannon’s writing that corroborates what she says in the book about being the kind of person who becomes a doctor because of the people. I enjoyed her discussing the medical side of the job but this was done rarely and in a way that was easy to understand. She focuses a lot more on the emotional side of the job. Her coming to accept the things she sees in her patients every day, working such long, taxing hours and dealing with some unpleasant people.

At one point in the book Cannon works in a psychiatric ward and her honest reflections on this experience were succinct yet very resonant.

I really loved Cannon’s writing throughout the whole book, she was very open about the experiences and the hardships she faced, not afraid to discuss the things that to other people may be taboo.
All of the people she mentioned in the book felt whole and I had an emotional connection to all of them, often making me tear up.

Once I reached the end I did feel that the last couple of chapters felt a little rushed. I felt that the end was abrupt and that I really wanted more, more discussion of how and why Cannon decided to leave medicine and what this looked like.
I had the overall feeling at the end that the book felt unfinished or that it maybe needed more. Possibly elaborating on the discussion at the beginning and the end of joining the medical profession and leaving it would have solved this for me.

Despite that, this was still a very enjoyable reading experience. I loved the insights into a job I know very little about and Cannon’s writing is always a winner for me.

I’d like to thank Serpent’s Tail/Profile Books and NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read ‘Breaking & Mending’ by Joanna Cannon in exchange for my honest and unbiased review.
Joanna Cannon has had various jobs but has always wanted to work in mental health. In 2003 she books a place on a first aid course and enrols as a mature student to do three Science A-Levels, applying one year later to join a medical school where she’s accepted as a ‘wild card’. During her five years of training, as she moves through each branch of general medicine, the stresses she endures take everything out of her until she’s doubting her own ability as a junior doctor. When she moves on to Psychiatry she finally finds her niche in life and spends some of the happiest times of her career.
‘Breaking & Mending’ is the eye-opening memoir of the author’s time as a junior doctor and takes us through the blood, sweat and tears involved in being involved in general medicine. Some parts of her memoir are warming, some are funny, some sad, and parts were so touching they made me cry. We learn how many of the profession are so overworked they doubt their ability to drive home safely, and how they’re looked down on if they ask for a break as they’re so hungry they can’t function properly. I have nothing but respect and gratitude for the dedication and care that the members of the healing profession give to the community around the country. ‘Breaking & Mending’ has been beautifully written with sensitivity and compassion and has given me a lot to think about and be thankful for.

A frank, moving and beautifully written memoir exploring, through the highs and lows of her career path as a junior doctor.

It's incredible that any junior doctors make it at all, considering what they go through to make it. It really feels as though the system (both of the work of junior doctors, and much of the NHS) needs a significant overhaul - this really is a call to action, as well as a very compelling read.

I didn't really need a reminder of the brilliance of people who work for the NHS, the sacrifice and strain they undertake in their job to care for everyone. But even so, even with all that's going on, this was an extra reminder. Powerful, emotional, big picture stresses to the small moments in someone's dying breaths, it was a proper gut punch of a book. (tldr: Protect the NHS, always.)

What an emotional and extremely moving memoir this is from best selling author Dr Joanna Cannon. This describes her experiences as an older medical student and a junior doctor and it is a gripping read.

First of all, her story of how she got to apply to be a medical student is positively inspiring and she is living proof that if you want something badly enough, that you are prepared to work hard and have the right mindset then you can achieve anything. She was the ‘wild card’ entry for her year. She tells some amazing stories of people who help her overcome some of the difficulties of training such as your first dissection and how she came to see the body as miraculous. She describes how she learned from her patients the right words, the right sort of kindness, how to deal with trauma and how to deliver the worst news. A lot of this is heartbreaking and at times jaw dropping and you realise that sometimes it’s necessary to have nerves of steel but at the end of the day, they are human and whilst they help mend if they can, they also break. Junior doctors workload is well known and in the NHS they must run on adrenaline as they are frequently exhausted and as if we didn’t know it already, Covid 19 demonstrates their burden is huge and they often cannot fix problems. One things the author says really resonates with me - junior doctors begin their rotations in August which is said to be the worst time as a patient to appear at hospital. She says that’s wrong as they are fresh, they’re not exhausted and their brains are crammed with up to date knowledge, I totally agree. One gorgeous, young junior doctor, one August asked the right questions and noticed a symptom my mother presented with that two consultants had failed to observe over an eighteen month period. We got a diagnosis, it wasn’t what we hoped for but we now knew, so the authors words struck a real chord with me. She talks of developing a sixth sense with patients and that echoes with me as a teacher, we too develop it with experience and like in medicine, it nips things in the bud. I love how she talks so wonderfully about her patients, it’s so apparent she cares and has oodles of warmth and is a very compassionate doctor and without spoiling this excellent read, they aren’t all bursting with it.

Overall, an absolute gem of a book which unites her literary career with her medical one as medicine too is about stories. It’s a very well written book too. I love her gratitude to those who help her, you feel the brutal pressure, the just hanging on by your fingernails in order to survive, the debilitating toll that working for the NHS can take but also it’s humanity, it’s care, that it gives hope, that it reassures, that it’s kind, it’s teamwork and it’s there for us 24 hours a day. A resounding thank you to her and to the many thousands of others who have recently risked their lives for us. 🌈Thank you 🌈

With thanks to NetGalley and Serpents Tale/Profile Books for the ARC in return for an honest review.

Joanna Cannon's writing is beautiful and thought-provoking. I have the utmost respect for her decision and determination to follow a medical career in her forties. The book is more a collection of short stories from her career. I would like it to include more stories as I found it to be short. Nevertheless, it kept my interest until the end.

One of the most important things that one can do as a healthcare worker is to connect, to bear witness to the horrible things that cross the threshold into your office or clinic or hospital daily, to take on the sheer weight of the world that you see every single day. This book covers this impossible task in a beautiful way, looking into the exhausting world of constant compassion and the necessity of caring for patients whilst maintaining some semblance of your own mental health.

I had no prior experience with the author, so reading this book as a first experience was lovely. The writing is lyrical and keeps you held close to what is happening- the empathy that she holds in her heart for those she cares for is overwhelming. We're privileged to live in a Commonwealth where healthcare is a right, not a privilege, and so these recent volumes from various authors about the pitfalls of the NHS and Medicare are very necessary- they show us the underbelly of how hard all doctors work to save lives. I especially loved reading about the card she received from a sister of one of the patients- it's things like that that keep people going.

I think the story of the night shift where the supervising doctor simply walked off will stay with me for a long time. To be in such a vulnerable position must be awful, and to have to manage it with only ten days under your belt a real-life horror story. I can only hope that books like this bring attention to the fact that doctors are as human as the rest of us, and it is so necessary to care for them as such.

“I learned that returning a life to someone very often has nothing to do with restoring a heartbeat.”

Joanna Cannon is a consummate storyteller, having had two best selling novels under her belt – and her gift for writing is amply demonstrated in this profoundly moving memoir of her training as a doctor and early medical career.
She was chosen by the Medical School admissions professor as a ‘wild card’ candidate to study medicine – a mature student without the usual privileged educational background.
We shadow her through all the rigours of medical school and her days and nights on the wards of NHS hospitals, sharing glimpses of the hidden world behind the scenes – and screens – of hospital wards which is usually concealed from patients, and discovering the secret code in the nurse's mysterious message ‘a package for Rose Cottage’.
Eventually, Cannon’s caring, empathetic nature with patients made it difficult to maintain a professional distance. This factor, combined with unsympathetic senior doctors and the pressures of NHS bureaucracy, left her vulnerable to compassion fatigue and a physical and mental breakdown.
However, her special talent for close observation and listening to the patients’ stories, which was discouraged on the overworked and understaffed NHS wards, became an invaluable skill when she finally achieved her ambition of working with psychiatric patients - and later as a novelist. Highly recommended.

I really enjoyed this one and it felt very real to be reading it amongst the pandemic. Joanna really sets out the truth of being a doctor, the chronic underfunding the NHS has had and the toll it takes on her health. Insightful and sad, a must read

Heart-wrenchingly honest and exceptionally powerful, this beautiful memoir tells of Joanna Cannon's insight and story into life as a junior doctor. Walking the wards of Cannon's memories we witness the extraordinary and the tragic, the shocking and the heartache as Cannon unashamedly reveals stories of her first post-mortem to sitting with a patient in their final moments.

Cannon's words ring wise and raw. So beautifully written is Breaking & Mending that even in the darkest moments of Cannon's snapshots, a glimmer of hope and compassion was nearby. I was so moved by the stories of humanity and love and loss which Cannon trusted us with that I found myself, on multiple occasions, paused in a quiet moment of reflection. I am so grateful to all those who work in healthcare and this book undoubtedly shows us why we need to take better care of those who care for us.

Since Adam Kay's This Is Going to Hurt, there has been an undeniable mass of medical memoirs. From sobering stories on the frontline of intensive care to the startling notes of a brain surgeon and the remarkable insight into the life of nurses, these books have been devoured by many. Breaking & Mending should be at the very top of your list.

Having read Joanna Cannon's previous novels The Trouble With Goats and Sheep and Three Things About Elsie and really enjoyed them, when I saw Breaking and Mending on #Netgalley I requested it immediately. I'm not a huge nonfiction reader but because I liked Joanna's writing style I jumped at the chance to read this book. It's so much more than a tales of a junior doctor. Breaking and Mending broke my heart, informed me, made me laugh and made me think. This is not an easy read because Joanna Cannon writes with such a searing honesty you are exhausted with her and when she is broken you feel every bit of her brokenness. This is such a soul baring book it deserves to be read with respect and remembered. The NHS is a wonderful institution but years of underfunding have left it understaffed and under resourced but the people who work there for the most part are stalwarts. Staff are told to administer self care as a priority but when a doctor has to produce a death cert to go to an uncle's funeral for 3 hours you can see that words are cheap in a dysfunctional system. Attitudes to mental health issues are changing, slowly but surely but in an underfunded system mental health is a very poor relation. I don't know why but Jo's psychiatry rotation really resonated with me. We judge when we should be offering a helping hand, we turn our backs on those we perceive to be outside our version of normal but what we don't see is that we are all human and we all have an individual story to tell. This book showed me this so clearly. Jo's writing is heartfelt and honest. Also the clarity of the writing and the ability to convey and make the reader understand the emotion in situations is a gift. I would like to thank Joanna Cannon for writing this book and for allowing us the privilege of reading it.

This is an incredible book that takes a look at what it means to be a doctor. It's raw, emotional, and is an important read for those who don't understand what doctors go through.