Adam Kay: humour with a purpose
The bestselling author spoke about the state of the NHS and the strangeness of selecting an actor to play himself
You’re probably very aware of Adam Kay and his book This is Going to Hurt — 1.5m people have read it, after all – and two years on it’s still on The Sunday Times bestseller list. “It still feels utterly surreal,” said Kay.
Compiled from the diaries he kept when working as a junior doctor, the memoir/love letter/cry-for-help draws both laughs and tears. “It was kind of flogged as a funny book,” Kay commented, “but by the nature of the job, it can’t ever just be funny stuff. Actually, it’s quite a sad book.”
But it is an accurate representation of the job and Kay has a purpose: “I’m very lucky and honoured to have a loud voice, in a way that most doctors don’t, and if I can help in some way then that’s what I think I need to do.”
Kay published that first book as a defence of junior doctors after they were criticised during their 2016 strikes. Since then, he’s drawn attention to the lack of mental health support and training provided to healthcare professionals. “It’s a stiff upper lip culture — you’re a bloody doctor and you bloody get on with it,” but that culture has to change to solve the staff retention crisis in the NHS, Kay said.
His second memoir, Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas, featuring the festive cuts of his diaries, is out now and Kay is currently working on the script for the TV adaptation of This is Going to Hurt. “It’s really weird to be in some horrible BBC basement having these discussions which are like standard dinner party questions: ‘Who would play you in the film version of your life?’” Does he have an answer? “I have some ideas, but I don’t want to say them out loud in case I jinx them,” he demurs.
Kay won’t go back to practising medicine, “But I definitely see myself going back in a teaching capacity or policy-creating capacity. And I think when life is a bit quieter that’s something I would enjoy doing.”
“At the time, I’d never experienced anything like that, not on that scale of deprivation. We were at sea for two months, rowing two hours on, two hours off, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
“I don’t think a smile was broken the whole way across, but it remains one of my proudest achievements. People want to know which was harder — rowing the Atlantic, climbing Everest, or walking to the South Pole — and all of them had their own hardships. But where Everest had moments of complete beauty, I don’t recall any of those on the Atlantic. I just remember a really grumpy Olympian shouting at me.
“We capsized halfway across. There was a huge storm. I was on the oars very early one morning and we got pitchpoled. By this stage, we’d become incredibly complacent, we’d stopped wearing life jackets or safety harnesses. I found myself in the water with nothing, just my emergency watch.
“The boat was upturned, no sign of James. Somehow, I got back to the boat and was able to right it. I was ready to pull that emergency beacon to summon the rescue. We’d lost our solar panels, our water desalinaters. We’d lost our stove, satellite phone, navigation — everything was lost. And James chucked a wet towel at me and said, ‘Right, you’ve got five minutes to pull yourself together and get back on the oars before we lose our position in the race’. [I was] like, what?
“But it was the best decision we could have made, because that night 10 boats capsized. Amazingly our boat was intact; lots of them shattered. But we got through it. It’s the old cliché, ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’. I realised that who you are is all in the mind, and if you have confidence about what you can do, you can achieve unbelievable things.”