Daily Mail

Some doctors turn to drink, others turn to drugs... I WROTE A BESTSELLER

He’s the ex-doctor whose painfully funny book has sold over a million copies and is being made into a major BBC drama. But as he tells here, it all began with a shattering disaster

- by Nicole Lampert

ADAM KAY is a bona fide phenomenon. This shy, unshowy man is officially Britain’s favourite author of the past 12 months. His diary about his life as a junior doctor, This Is Going To Hurt, which is by turn hilarious and heart-breaking, has been at the top of the bestseller­s list for more than a year.

It has won four National Book awards and has sold more than a million copies.

By day he is working on an eight- episode adaptation of his book for BBC television while most nights he’s performing to packed theatres all over the country where audiences laugh — and cry — over his hospital anecdotes and join in with his ditties about his rollercoas­ter life working in a hospital.

He’s one of the few performers who can get audiences to join in his song about diagnosis with gusto. This is not what adam expected when he quit medicine eight years ago, after a seemingly routine birth went disastrous­ly wrong. ‘I thought I just needed some time out and presumed I would go back to being a doctor,’ he says when we meet in the decidedly un-NHS-like private members’ club, Soho House.

‘The only thing I liked doing outside of work was writing funny songs so I thought I would give it a go before going back to medicine. I never ended up going back but now I am talking about medicine all the time.’

adam was always going to be a doctor. He came from a family of doctors — father, cousins, siblings were all medics. He worked excruciati­ngly hard as a junior doctor and wasn’t far off from being made a consultant when he quit. even now he calls it, ‘the best job in the world’ and says he misses it ‘terribly’.

Clearly, obstetrics were the best bit. ‘You start with one patient and you end up sending two home — that’s an amazing batting average,’ he grins. ‘I delivered 2,000 babies but each time I got a high. When you are at a fertility clinic and help a couple get pregnant when they have been trying so hard you feel like a magician.’

So it was understand­able that when his few months of time out turned into five years — as he found success as a comedy writer for shows including Mrs Brown’s Boys and Have I Got News For You — he was still heartbroke­n when he was delisted from the medical register because he hadn’t been practising.

With a degree of nostalgia, he looked back at his old diaries, kept partly because he needed to keep a record of what he had been up to and partly, he believes now, to keep his sanity. ‘Some doctors turn to drink, others turn to drugs. Writing about my day became my solace.’ He realised they were funny and thought perhaps he could make people laugh with them.

This was two years ago and doctors were in the news because they were striking over working hours.

‘The junior doctors were under fire and upsettingl­y it felt like people were being told doctors were striking because they were being greedy and wanted more money,’ he says.

‘From the outside they sounded awful. Doctors have such a quiet voice and what they had to say wasn’t being heard. I knew it wasn’t like that so I thought if I could present one bloke’s experience of being a doctor it might show a few people what it was like. The book shows the impact of the job on a human being which is what doctors are.’

He decided to put together a show for the edinburgh Festival hoping that if 5,000 people saw it, he would have done his bit.

But then audience members told him again and again that he needed to turn the diaries into a book. The rest is publishing history as his diaries became a huge bestseller. It has also been translated into 31 languages and he gets letters from fans all over the world.

The book — and his show in which he reads from it — is a powerful mix of comedy and tragedy. There are stories of patients with odd objects stuck in unlikely places in their bodies. ‘ They were known as the eiffel Tower injuries,’ he grins. ‘They always start by telling you: “I fell.”’

THERE are the happy babies he delivered, the endless nights he worked and the surprising stories he tells of the nuts and bolts of working in the NHS, including the revelation that every year junior doctors start work and more experience­d doctors move to different department­s or hospitals on the same day, known among medics as ‘Black Wednesday’ — black because it is quite a dangerous time for the public to be ill.

It is an incredible insight into the people who come into the NHS, from the father-to be who fell and cracked his skull while playing on a birthing ball to the translator who told adam his patient was ‘a hermaphrod­ite’ — it turned out they meant ‘a haemophili­ac’. and the foot-in-the-mouth moments such as when he accidental­ly revealed the sex of his friend’s baby when she asked him to look at the scan. ‘The temperatur­e in the room dropped by about ten degrees,’ he recalls.

One of the most overwhelmi­ng impression­s you get from the book is just how hard — and what long hours — doctors work. In one entry he wakes up on Christmas Day to a call from one of his colleagues asking where he is because he is late.

He gets flustered until he realises he is in his car in the hospital car park — he was so tired he fell asleep in there hours earlier on Christmas eve. ‘and the good thing was I wasn’t even that late for work in the end,’ he laughs.

It is all done with such levity and good humour that the last entry comes as a shock. It’s a routine pregnancy that goes horribly wrong and it’s the last entry because shortly afterwards he walked out of the job he loved.

‘We all have bad days at work but my bad day at work destroyed a family,’ he says. ‘The difficult thing was that no one was there for me to talk to about it. The reaction from the people around me was as if I’d had a migraine — that’s hard for you but you’ll still be at clinic tomorrow.’

He was still at clinic but found overnight he was a different doctor. Paranoid and tetchy, terrified of another disaster. He told no one about how he was feeling. His family and the man he later married only discovered the reason he left the NHS the first time they heard his show.

‘The culture of not talking about these things needs to change but I acknowledg­e that I didn’t help myself because I didn’t tell anyone why I left,’ he says. ‘I just told my parents, “I don’t think it’s for me.” I don’t think I was very convincing because I was passionate about my job.’

every night, when he talks about the incident which made him leave his job, he wells up. Tears have sprung to his eyes as we discuss it.

‘I used to wake up in a cold sweat at least once a week every week since it happened,’ he reveals. ‘That hasn’t happened since I started talking about it. It is not my branch of medicine but I was probably going through some sort of post-traumatic stress. I must have read that diary entry 300 times and it doesn’t get easier. I don’t want it to be easy, though.

‘I get a lot of messages from doctors and they say the book mirrors their experience­s wherever they are in the world. all doctors have patients they can’t forget. at least one out of every 30 will write to me about something they have never told anyone else and it will be a harrowing story. That is the culture of it, and it’s a culture that needs to change.’

Sometimes a book comes along that changes things, and This Is Going To Hurt might just do that.

adam had a fractious meeting with Jeremy Hunt, then Health Secretary and now Foreign Secretary, got sick of adam’s fans sending him copies of

the book and called him in for a chat. ‘He is very slick, very clever,’ recalls Adam. ‘I had half a decade of questions I wanted to ask him but first he wanted to tell me his side of the story. I don’t know why he would think that I would change my mind.

‘When I started to ask my ques - tions he eventually snapped: “What is this, an interrogat­ion? I thought I was inviting you for a nice chat.” ’

‘I told him I didn ’t come for a nice chat — I came because he invited me. From that point on it became like that moment you know you are in big trouble with your other half and all they will say is, “yes”, “no”, “fine”. It got to that stage of awkwardnes­s. It was horrible. Eventually I said: “I am really sorry if I came across nicer in the book than I do in real life.” He said: “Oh no, you have been quite consistent.” ’

But he is ‘cautiously optimis - tic’ about the present Health Secretary Matt Hancock who has already read his book. They have been in contact and plan to meet.

Eight years after leaving medi - cine, he is surprised to find himself becoming an advocate for his former profession in particular for doctors’ working hours and look - ing after them better.

‘It isn’t a political book but it does have a message,’ he says. ‘The NHS is so precious and that is thanks to the people who work there. Medicine is a profession which is very good at caring for other people, but not for itself. You are forced to try to build an emo - tional forcefield because no one is caring for the carers.

‘No one trains you how to deal with trauma — so it ’s a culture where everyone pretends to be fine. While I am no longer a useful member of society , I am happy to try and do what I can to help people.

‘Caring for the carers has long been a Cinderella issue, but people are starting to address it and being part of that conversati­on is hugely humbling. It is amazing to think that a book, which is on the face of it just funny stories about being a doctor, could make a difference.

‘If anything I do with my silly stories can actually help my former colleagues then I feel that is my life’s work done.’

 ??  ??
 ??  ?? From scalpels to scripts: Adam Kay
From scalpels to scripts: Adam Kay

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United Kingdom