Many Different Kinds of Love: A story of life, death and the NHS

The messages from the Staff each day written in a diary. And the notes from the patient’s viewpoint.

We all read about people who were critically ill from covid, but few have been able to write about their experience. Michael Rosen is the exception and his review shows that indeed there are many kinds of love. Thank you Michael sharing your experience so eloquently.

As many of us have had experience with Covid in one way or another, such as being infected, having family, friends and acquaintances having the virus, surviving, dying, or having what is being called Long Covid, so our world has certainly altered somewhat, and so have our habits. We also all know that Michael Rosen was taken into hospital with the virus and was like many others intubated and being placed in an induced coma were put on ventilators. Fortunately, one of the nation’s favourite writers survived this, and thanks to that we have this wonderful book. With messages sent out by his wife so that people knew what was going on, extracts from his patient’s diary written by NHS staff who cared for him (and these are people from all around the world), we also have new prose poems from the author himself, plus we are given his These are the Hands which he wrote for the 60th anniversary of the NHS. On top of that there are some lovely illustrations by Chris Riddell.It has to be admitted that although the whole subject of the current pandemic is rather depressing there is a certain amount of humour injected here with some rather wry observations ( I like the patient who when told that his pee was rather dark replied that we were going through dark times), and also a sense of despair and anger, such as those people who deny the pandemic and conspiracy theorists and our government twiddling its thumbs instead of doing something earlier. Hopefully due to who the author is this book will stay in circulation for quite some time, and other generations will grow up reading about the pandemic. If you think about it in this country, we had the last outbreak of bubonic plague in 1910, and then of course there was what is called Spanish flu in 1918, and yet at school children are taught about the First World War, and these events that happened either side of that are forgotten and left out. Hopefully this pandemic will remain in memory and in books, so lessons are not forgotten.

This is Michael Rosen’s account of his struggle to recover from his near-death experience with Covid 19. His gratitude and bravery shine through. Beautifully expressed… as expected! What a treasure!

You just feel every page you read. Little tears along the way. Good read.

I read with interest this fascinating, moving account.

Beautiful In it’s simplicity but covering serious & complicated feelings & events.Very evocative for me.Lovely man

Everyone should read it, including the politicians who seems nurses wages “fair”