Everything is True: A junior doctor's story of life, death and grief in a time of pandemic PDF
Preview Everything is True: A junior doctor's story of life, death and grief in a time of pandemic
Everything is True For my sister, Kiron And for all those who have lost someone they love BY THE SAME AUTHOR Bitter Sweets Corner Shop The Way Things Look to Me Half Life The Flying Man The Good Children BOOKS FOR CHILDREN The Cure for a Crime: A Double Detectives Medical Mystery Diagnosis Danger: A Double Detectives Medical Mystery ‘After you have read this story of great misfortune, you will blame the author for your own insensitivity, accusing of wild exaggeration and flights of fancy. But rest assured: this tragedy is not a fiction. Everything is true.’ Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot Quarantine: originally defined as a period of forty (quarante in French, quaranta in Italian) days of isolation to prevent the spread of contagious disease. Contents PROLOGUE: Six Months Before Lockdown… 1 Zero Day – The Day Before Lockdown 2 Their Stories 3 Healers and Hitch-hikers 4 Birthday 5 Scribes 6 Witness 7 Pariah 8 The Mask 9 Angels 10 Soldiers 11 Frontline 12 Fighter 13 Coward 14 The Fridge 15 Insider 16 Nostradamus 17 Resurrection 18 Rage 19 Mothers 20 Sad Face 21 Sputter and Gag 22 Sick 23 The Good Death 24 Swab Epilogue – Poem for Kiron Author’s Note Acknowledgements A Note on the Author PROLOGUE: Six Months Before Lockdown… … your sister tells you that she’s dying, at her kitchen table, with the sunshine streaming in from her expensive wall of French windows, and there’s not much you can say to that. A little bit of you wishes that you hadn’t turned up so dutifully, that you’d made any feeble family-avoiding excuse, because she wouldn’t have told you in a text message or on the phone. Not again, anyway. She’d done that before, a couple of times, actually, about matters of life and death, and it hadn’t gone well. Sadly, spiralling dark news comes out as weirdly comic when you’re separated by a screen. Holding a handset. She’d called you one morning, sixteen years earlier, when you both worked in Berkeley Square in big offices that were minutes from each other, and came straight out with this: They said Dad’s dead. A glittering thread of disbelieving humour in her voice. They said what? Matching disbelief in yours, admiration, even, that your dad had managed to fake his death and saddle some poor corpse with his debts. You both didn’t think that he would do anything so mundane as to die.
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