Sick NHS joke will have you in stitches
THIS IS GOING TO HURT: Secret Diaries Of A Junior Doctor by Adam Kay Picador, £16.99
IF YOU only read one book this year, make it Adam Kay’s hilarious, horrifying, heartbreaking insight into the life of a junior doctor (although as he points out “junior doctor” is something of a misnomer, “a bit like calling everyone in politics apart from the prime minister a ‘junior politician’”).
Kay worked on hospital wards for six gruelling years before a devastating experience in surgery made him hang up his scrubs in 2010 and carve out a new life as a comedy writer.
When the General Medical Council later wrote to tell him his name would be removed from the medical register, Kay culled boxes of paperwork, “shredding files faster than Jimmy Carr’s accountant”, and stumbled upon his “training portfolio” in which he recorded his clinical experiences.
This diary formed the basis of his book which he wrote as junior doctors started coming under attack from politicians.
Kay realised “the public weren’t hearing the truth about what it means to be a doctor” and felt he had a duty to redress the balance.
I knew junior doctors worked hard. We’re all abundantly aware they are stretched by limited resources. But I was astounded to discover just how relentlessly gruelling their day-to-day lives are and how impossible it is for them to have any kind of life outside their work.
There was nothing unusual about Kay working 100-hour weeks. As he explains, wards are run on skeleton staff and rely “on the charity of doctors staying beyond their contracted hours to get things done”.
He falls asleep in his car while waiting at traffic lights. He falls asleep sitting on a stool, waiting to perform an operation.
The Post Office leave a “while you were out” card but they only hold parcels for 18 days, “every one of which I’ve been at work”, so his partner’s birthday present is returned to sender.
His long-suffering best friend Ron eventually tries to “dump” Kay who thanks to his job has missed Ron’s engagement party, stag do and even his wedding. But since becoming a doctor, Kay has seen more of Ron than almost anyone else. “Non-medics can never appreciate quite how tough it is to be a doctor and the impact it has on real life.”
Lest you think a generous pay
packet might take the sting out of the situation, at this stage his hourly pay worked out at £6.60 per hour, “slightly more than McDonald’s till staff get, though significantly less than a shift supervisor”.
Even when he works his way up the ladder and his ID card says senior registrar, “my salary also said ‘bank cashier’ or ‘reasonably experienced milkman’.”
And yet his job is rather more responsible than a milkman’s.
Worryingly, doctors are repeatedly thrown in the deep end with patients and one day Kay performs scans in the Early Pregnancy Unit when he has never even seen the scan performed before. Yet “misdiagnosis can see you on the wrong side of a negligence/ manslaughter charge”.
PATIENTS can be aggressive, ungrateful and breathtakingly stupid and the book is spilling over with memorable patient encounters. Countless people stick bizarre objects into their orifices.
One account that will haunt me forever is that of the teenage boy whose drunken escapades resulted in a fall down a lamp post and a “degloved” penis.
Then there is the lady diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer, sobbing because she will miss her daughter’s wedding and her son’s graduation, and Kay spends two hours listening to her, “the longest I’ve ever spent with a patient who wasn’t under anaesthetic”.
However for all the trials and tribulations, Kay felt privileged to work for the NHS. “Who doesn’t love the NHS? (Well, apart from the Secretary of State for Health.)”
The extremely squeamish or extremely prudish might want to tread carefully but still shouldn’t miss this eye-opening and brutally funny insight into the appalling pressure upon the NHS.
What a terrible loss Adam Kay is to the medical profession. But what a tremendous gain for your bookshelf.