I love creating this podcast for many reasons but chief among them is the opportunity it affords me to speak to people with whom I might not necessarily cross paths in my every day.
This has never been more true than with Jim Down, a consultant in critical care and anaesthesia at University College London Hospitals who was frontline during the Covid-19 pandemic, attended to former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko when he was poisoned with Polonium-210 in 2006 and was one of the first on the scene of the Hatfield train disaster.
This show is about hearing how my guests have navigated the more challenging parts of life and come out the other side, and Jim’s stories and learnings are extraordinary.
His openness about his own mental health and the challenges he’s had to overcome as a result of the cumulative stress of life in hospital wards, intensive care units and high-stress situations is levelling, to say the least.
Jim is also extremely open, warm and thoughtful, and as you’d perhaps expect from someone who has to make life-or-death decisions, shows real compassion. Even as someone who saw the impact of the Covid-19 virus, he makes efforts to understand the people who now say it was a hoax, which feels extraordinarily magnanimous when you hear what he saw, first-hand in 2020.
Life in the Balance and Life Support are available to order now.
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