Rachel Clarke > Quotes

“Boris Johnson delivered an unexpectedly jaunty press conference in which he assured an anxious nation we would ‘turn the tide within the next twelve weeks’ and ‘send coronavirus packing in this country’, as though it were some unwanted door-to-door salesman.”
― Rachel Clarke, Breathtaking

“How can a health service so stripped of spare capacity cope with the demands of a once-ina-lifetime global pandemic? I bite my lip and think longingly of Germany’s twenty-nine intensive care beds per 100,000 people – four times the number of ICU beds in Britain”
― Rachel Clarke, Breathtaking

“We have a fantastic health service and it is well capable of handling the most tremendous pressures, as everyone knows.”
― Rachel Clarke, Breathtaking

“He lies on hospital sheets, but he’s drowning. Behind closed doors, with neither fanfare nor drama, he’s been quietly drowning all night. The act of voicing distress – alerting another human being to his plight – takes spare air he no longer possesses.”
― Rachel Clarke, Breathtaking

“There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. LEONARD COHEN, ‘Anthem”
― Rachel Clarke, Breathtaking

“what dominates palliative medicine is not the proximity to death, but the best bits of living. Kindness, courage, love, tenderness – these are the qualities that so often saturate a person’s last days. It can be chaotic, messy, almost violent with grief, but I am surrounded at work by human beings at their most remarkable, unable to retreat from the fact and the ache of our impermanence, yet getting on with living and loving all the same.”
― Rachel Clarke, Dear Life: A Doctor's Story of Love and Loss

“bleak news breaks in the Health Service Journal that Northwick Park Hospital in Harrow has been forced to declare a critical incident after running out of ICU beds.”
― Rachel Clarke, Breathtaking

“with the Prime Minister rushed recently to intensive care where he too is being treated for coronavirus.”
― Rachel Clarke, Breathtaking

“Being protected entails being dehumanised.”
― Rachel Clarke, Breathtaking

“I am of certain convinced that the greatest heroes are those who do their duty in the daily grind of domestic affairs whilst the world whirls as a maddening dreidel. FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE”
― Rachel Clarke, Breathtaking

“There isn’t enough of anything as long as we live. But at intervals a sweetness appears and, given a chance, prevails.”
― Rachel Clarke, Dear Life: A Doctor's Story of Love and Loss

“The government’s rapidly constructed pandemic narrative invokes ‘heroism’, the ‘Blitz spirit’, the country ‘coming together’ and yet, in all this noise and bellicose playacting, it seems the residents of hospices have been forgotten, abandoned, as they quietly approach the end of their lives, facing eviction for want of some paper masks.”
― Rachel Clarke, Breathtaking

“hesitate and you shall be chastised. But over-confidence has its drawbacks. Arrogance and reflective practice do not go hand in hand.”
― Rachel Clarke, Dear Life: A Doctor's Story of Love and Loss

“NHS staff dread winter because nothing quite curdles the soul like pouring your all into a system at breaking point.”
― Rachel Clarke, Breathtaking

“the life we have left is still life in all its loveliness, if only we can inhabit the present.”
― Rachel Clarke, Dear Life: A Doctor's Story of Love and Loss