Book Review Blood, Sweat and Tea, and More Blood, More Sweat and Another Cup of Tea (Tom Reynolds)

Plot Summary

Both books are composed from Tom Reynolds's blog. He is an Emergency Medical Technician working for the London Ambulance Service, and keeps a blog of his daily working life.

The both books are made up of many chapters, each one dealing with a particular patient. There are many patients throughout the book, each presenting with a range of different conditions. He discusses these, both in the treatment he and his colleagues provided and the problems they had to overcome.

Book Review

Being a nurse myself on an admissions ward, I can fully understand where he is coming from. In the second book (More Tears, More Sweat and Another Cup of Tea) he is sometimes sarcastic about the patients he discusses, the regulars who attend for no reason in particular, and I, although quietly moaning about it amongst my colleagues, and not on a blog or in a book, often share his thoughts.

I am able, also, too agree with his opinions regarding some of the professionals he describes. I work on a medical admission unit, and we receive a large proportion of the type of patients he describes from the GP, very often (particularly out of hours) without any form of past medical history; no fax or letter with the patient.

I, too, have received the patient on my ward who could quite easily have been brought in by family, but who expect all the staff to run around for them. I have also admitted the patient who has had a stroke two days ago, but didn't want to bother any one over the weekend.

As a fellow health care professional, I fully understand where Tom Reynolds is coming from in each of his many chapters. It is interesting to hear about the treatment of the patient prior to coming in to hospital, where everything is to hand, emergency assistance is only a shout away, and there is room and equipment to manouevre the patients.

I downloaded these books on to my new phone (I wanted to try out a variety of the apps, and books was one of them). The chapters were short, the longest ones, and very few of them, being about 20 pages long. If these books are available in print, I would imagine they would be rather short - they didn't take me long to read on my phone. The short chapters are excellent, though, for when you've just got a few minutes to kill.