Still, I Breathe

In 1979, a Grenadian teenager arrived in a Britain that didn't want him. He became an NHS consultant anyway, and spent the next four decades paying for it.

A boy grows up in a coal-pot kitchen, learns the roads by the buses that stop wherever a hand goes up, and watches a charismatic neighbour debate a fairer future in the market square. That boy becomes a doctor. Decades later, as a senior NHS consultant, he discovers that the fight for fairness never really ended. It just changed uniforms.

Still, I Breathe is Dr Anthony Adams's account of two lives lived at once: the Caribbean childhood that shaped him, and the NHS career that tested everything he believed about justice and belonging. One of a tiny minority of Black British-Caribbean doctors to make consultant, he raised concerns through the NHS's official channels - and found himself on the receiving end of the very dysfunction he was trying to fix: a flawed investigation, a paper trail no one wanted seen, and a system that treated the person who spoke up as the problem.

Weaving in staff surveys, inquiry findings, and first-hand testimony, Adams asks what happens when the people entrusted with our care are themselves worn down and unprotected.

For anyone who's waited too long for an appointment or wondered why a complaint went nowhere, Still, I Breathe is unflinching, well-documented, and hopeful. A personal memoir and an urgent case for change, from someone who lived every page of it.