Jim Down | The Truth about Covid-19, the emotional toll of working on the frontline and how to save your mental health.
The Emma Guns Show
Emma Gunavardhana
4.8 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 20 February 2023
⏱️ 74 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This episode of the Emma Gunn Show is sponsored by Mindful Chef, where healthy eating is made easy. |
| 0:06.6 | Mindful Chef is the UK's highest rated recipe box, having delivered over 30 million meals to more than 383,000 happy customers. |
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| 0:47.4 | I ordered a box recently and I had a delicious prawn and pineapple curry and a hearty but light beef and quinoa dish. |
| 0:54.4 | I was surprised at how quick and easy they were to cook and how flavorful each meal was. |
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| 1:12.8 | My meals were utterly delicious and easy to cook. |
| 1:16.0 | So, to get 25% of your first four boxes and use the code Emma Guns, E-M-M-A-G-U-N-S, |
| 1:23.4 | to get 25% of your first four boxes and make healthy eating easy this autumn. |
| 1:33.6 | Life's defining moments don't always feel that great when they are happening. |
| 1:37.6 | In the moment, they can feel challenging, uncomfortable, difficult, impossible even. |
| 1:43.4 | But with hindsight, they can take on a different shape. |
| 1:46.4 | Each week I asked my guests to share their biggest life learnings to date |
| 1:50.6 | as we explore those difficult, swampy, infuriating times and how they shaped them |
| 1:56.2 | all from a comfortable distance that supported them the time to take the positive |
| 2:01.0 | out of what might have seemed nothing but negative at the time. |
| 2:04.2 | Because whether it's risks, excuses, obstacles, opportunities both missed and taken, |
... |
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