‘Anaesthetists are like the medical cavalry and when you’re dealing with small babies, the stakes are very high’

As a consultant paediatric anaesthesiologist, Dr Colin Black works under extreme pressure with drugs that induce sedation, relaxation and euphoria. Here, the Derry-born doctor explains why he was moved to write a medical memoir, why he thinks the Irish healthcare service is in crisis, and how his pregnant wife coped when she became one of Ireland’s first Covid-19 cases

Anaesthetist Colin Black who has written a humorous memoir 'Gas Man'

Dónal Lynch

One slightly scant consolation of the pandemic has been a bit of perspective on who’s actually doing the most important jobs in society. Not celebrities or professional athletes or rock stars, most of us would now agree, but doctors and nurses. That they are all worthy of applause is conveyed by the catch-all term ‘frontline staff’, but, amongst doctors anyway, there has always been perceived hierarchies of importance amongst the public. Surgeons are venerated because we have a clear idea of what they do. Neurologists are intellectual gods. Anyone working on kids deserves canonisation, obviously. But what of a more pedestrian-sounding, nebulous (to the average layperson) field like anaesthesia? Surely, a book about putting people to sleep would, er, put you to sleep?

Not in Dr Colin Black’s capable hands. His diary of a year as a consultant anaesthetist, Gas Man, is an entertaining and sometimes antic account of life on the frontline of paediatric medicine. There are patients off their box on some glorious drug-induced euphoria, unconscious children who can’t stop farting, exasperated inner monologues that Black conducts with himself, and quip-a-minute footnotes to leaven the sometimes quite complex medical descriptions.