WHEN DR RACHEL CLARKE came home from working with Covid patients, the first thing she always did was take a shower. Desperate as she was not to infect her husband and two children, the virus wasn’t the only thing she was tr ying to scrub off. ‘You were tr ying to wash away what you had experienced that day, so you had a little bit of time that was pure, that wasn’t contaminated,’ she explains.
Driving home from hospital, she’d sometimes have to stop and cry over the horrors she had witnessed. But she was determined not to bring that trauma back into the family home. ‘ When my kids would tell me about going on a bike ride with their dad for the daily exercise, I couldn’t feel the fun and the joy they had, but I could – almost at one removed from it – by them telling me. And I didn’t want that to be contaminated by what I was seeing.’
And then, in the middle of the night when she couldn’t sleep, she poured the things she couldn’t talk about into her memoir, Breathtaking, which has just been turned into an ITV drama – and could do for burnt-out doctors what Mr Bates Vs The Post Office did for wrongly convicted sub -postmasters.
The drama splices together real-life footage of politicians insisting there’s no need to panic with fictionalised scenes depicting the horrific reality in hospitals, where frightened nurses are making PPE from bin bags. Although its central character, Dr Abbey Henderson, played by Joanne Froggatt, is a composite made up of different doctors’ experiences, her children are roughly the age of Clarke’s own (now 13 and 17).
Clarke co -wrote the script with Line Of Duty’s Jed Mercurio and Prasanna Puwanarajah, both former junior doctors themselves. To make it look as realistic as possible, the actors under went a medical bootcamp, being drilled in the techniques they perform on screen. ‘We really want our colleagues, when they watch it, to say, “Yes, that’s what it was like, I feel seen by this,”’ says Clarke. But mostly, she wants ordinar y viewers to understand how it felt to fight the medical equivalent of a war.
She cried while wri
