ER medicine doctor's book reveals how Portrush beach healed her following illness

Hailing originally from the Causeway Coast, Heidi Edmundson lived in a guesthouse which she said “creaked and groaned every winter with the gales coming off the Atlantic.”

The former Coleraine High School student was an avid reader, particularly of myths and fairy tales. Her love of reading became a love of writing and she wanted to be a writer when she grew up.

Her career path took a different turn as Heidi studied medicine in Dundee and has worked as a doctor since 1994, predominantly for the NHS.

She currently lives in London where she has been a consultant in Emergency Medicine for over 15 years.

However, she never forgot her love of writing and started to attend a weekly writing group about ten years ago. Initially she only wrote for fun, never intending any of her pieces to be read by anyone else.

However, when the COVID pandemic began to take hold in March 2020, Heidi was in Essaouira in Morocco on a creative writing holiday. During this time Morocco shut its borders, and she spent an anxious few days getting back to the UK.

There, she discovered that having a writing practice helped her manage the stressful situation. She continued to write daily when she got home to cope with the pressure of being a senior doctor working through the pandemic.

Heidi’s new book ‘Belly Full’ is a forthright and unflinching account of the ill-health of the NHS in general and Emergency Medicine services in particular - and a bold record of Heidi’s own health crisis.

It offers a candid view of what it is really like to work on the front line of the nation's health emergency, and the devastating implications for the well-being of doctors and nurses.

Heidi herself wrote: “It is the story of my illness in 2022. I also explore themes of the NHS and body image/the menopause.

"The last part of the book is about my time in Portrush when I came back to convalesce after my operation and how the beach healed me.”

Belly Full is available from www.constellationspress.co.uk, Amazon and Waterstones.