Stories from a fictional dialysis centre
The Circuit of Care is a series of character-driven stories about life within a fictional Irish dialysis centre: the patients who return three times each week, the staff whose skilled hands sustain them, and the relationships formed in the hours between connection and disconnection.
Here, life is measured in hours and millilitres, blood pressure and blood flow, alarms and adjustments. Yet the unit is more than a clinical space. It becomes a community shaped by humour, vulnerability, disagreement, companionship and the repeated work of caring for one another.
These are not stories about overcoming chronic illness. They are stories about living fully within it.
At the centre of the series is chosen kinship: people learning to be present to one another without pretending that every difficulty can be resolved. The machines remain necessary. The restrictions remain real. Nevertheless, tenderness, stubborn joy and ordinary grace continue to take root.
There is a particular kind of courage found in the dialysis chair: quiet, rhythmic and sustained without an audience.
The Books
The revised Circuit of Care series is being prepared one volume at a time in a new, unified pocket-book edition.
Chosen and Kept
Book 1 · Revised Second Edition
Declan and Marcus, Cillian and Aidan are four men bound not by blood but by the daily liturgy of care. Their friendship unfolds through saline and softness, shared snacks, difficult truths and stubborn joy.
Chosen and Kept introduces the people and relationships at the heart of The Circuit of Care. It is a story of queer kinship, medical truth and the grace of being chosen, known and held.
Pocket-book paperback · 119 pages · €9.99
[Buy the revised pocket-book edition from Lulu]
Hands That Know
Book 2
In a dialysis unit, knowledge is carried through hands: hands that prepare machines, adjust lines, complete charts, offer reassurance and recognise when something is wrong.
Hands That Know turns towards the staff, patients and companions whose repeated gestures transform clinical treatment into personal care. Through shared biscuits, quiet jokes and moments of wordless understanding, the second volume of The Circuit of Care explores what happens when competence and compassion meet.
It is a collection about embodied knowledge—the practical, attentive care through which people are noticed, remembered and reminded that they are not alone.
A new pocket-book edition is in preparation.
In the Rounds
Book 3
The medical round brings together different kinds of knowledge: charts and test results, clinical experience, and the patient’s understanding of their own body.
In the Rounds turns towards the doctors and consultants of the fictional dialysis centre. Through conversations beside the chair, difficult decisions and moments of unexpected humour, it explores what happens when medicine is practised with clarity, attention and compassion.
The third volume of The Circuit of Care honours the dignity found within routine and the trust built when patients are heard as well as examined.
A new pocket-book edition is in preparation.
Bears at the Threshold
Book 4
Some forms of courage are carried close.
Bears at the Threshold explores the comfort objects, familiar rituals and cherished companions that help people enter spaces shaped by treatment and uncertainty. Within the fictional dialysis centre, bears knitted, plush and remembered become signs of reassurance, identity and belonging.
The fourth volume of The Circuit of Care asks what healing can mean when cure is not possible. It finds healing in companionship, restored trust, reconciled anger and the quiet kindness of those who help another person feel safe.
It also celebrates a simple truth: adulthood should never require someone to surrender what brings comfort.
Forthcoming.
Binders, Biscuits, & Belonging
Book 5
Communities are held together by small rituals: binders remembered, preferences noticed, biscuits shared and stories carried beyond the clinic.
Binders, Biscuits, & Belonging gathers patients, staff and companions around the ordinary practices through which a clinical unit becomes a community. Food, mascots, recipes, writing and humour all become ways of noticing and including one another.
The fifth volume of The Circuit of Care celebrates the imagination that allows care to stretch beyond machines—and the simple assurance of knowing that there is a place where you belong.
Forthcoming.
About the Series
The Circuit of Care grew from Michael McFarland Campbell’s experience of long-term haemodialysis. Its setting and characters are fictional, but the medical routines, emotional realities and forms of companionship within it are written with lived knowledge.
The series honours healthcare without romanticising illness. It makes room for frustration, restriction, humour, difference, queer kinship and the quiet strength of being wanted—not despite who someone is, but because of it.
Buying the Books
Revised editions are published in pocket-book format and sold directly through the Lulu Bookstore.
Purchasing links will be added to this page as each new edition becomes available. Books described as “in preparation” or “forthcoming” cannot yet be ordered.
“There is a specific kind of bravery found in the dialysis chair—a quiet, rhythmic courage that doesn’t ask for an audience, yet sustains a whole world.”