While You Were Sleeping

No one knows anything about anaesthetics. Not even other doctors.

Most people think anaesthetists are not doctors at all. Yet anaesthetists are the medics who keep us alive, in a near-death state, when were under the knife or desperately ill in ICU. They are the great generalists, working on every kind of medical situation, from childbirth to to major operations such as heart transplants. They send us to the world beyond consciousness and bring us safely back again.

Consultant anaesthetist Hannah Scott takes us into the operating theatre to give us a witty, behind-the-scrubs account of everything that happens while youre unconscious under anaesthetic: the jokes, the crises, their consequences, the surgeons and their egos, and the drugs and equipment that keep us alive and pain-free. Along the way she examines all that was happening in the life of the anaesthetist herself, from junior doctor to the top of her profession, and beyond.