In This Short Life | In November 2020 I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t hear my husband breathing. This was unsettling, firstly because back then I rarely slept and secondly because his breathing over recent months had become so loud as a result of fluid build-up in the space between his lungs and chest wall, that I literally couldn’t not hear him.

As nursing unions gear up to protest the government’s three per cent pandemic pay rise, yours truly describes what it felt like to participate in the UK’s first-ever national nurses’ strike.