‘When you fall in love with Emergency Medicine, you can never imagine doing anything else.
It is a proper rollercoaster of peaks and troughs. And those of us who love it, we keep on loving it, no matter what it does to us. We just can’t help ourselves. We can’t stop loving it, even though it is consuming us, burning us up, sucking us dry and spitting us out.
The problem isn’t Emergency Medicine, it’s that we aren’t able to do the job we love. And so we continue, desperately trying to keep the thing we love so much alive.
We are fighting for the specialty every bit as much as we fight for our patients.’
Belly Full is a powerful account of one year in the life of an Emergency Medicine doctor as she denies and normalises her own serious health issues, while the system implodes around her.
The book delivers insightful perspectives on the intersection of personal health challenges and the broader issues facing the NHS, offering a deeper understanding of the system’s complexities. It presents a candid view of what it is really like to work on the front line of the nation’s health emergency, and the devastating implications for the well-being of our doctors and nurses.
It also offers hope. It is alive to the rewards of living, the bounteous experience of creativity, and the ways in which we care and heal.
Dr Heidi Edmundson grew up in Portrush. She studied medicine in Dundee, Scotland, and has worked as a doctor since 1994, predominantly for the NHS. She currently lives in London where she has been a consultant in Emergency Medicine for over fifteen years. During the pandemic, she discovered that having a daily writing practice helped her manage the stressful situation. Her debut novel, Darkness in the City of Light, was published last year.
She is passionate about building positive workplace cultures and has developed a number of initiatives using fun and creativity to facilitate staff wellbeing.
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