See you crying with laughter
ALONG with glad tidings of comfort and joy, the festive season ushers in a sleighload of ho-ho-horror stories for long-suffering NHS staff.
Former doctor Adam Kay’s new book,twasthe Nightshift Before Christmas, recalls a chap who “wrapped his entire body in tinfoil to go to a fancy dress party as a turkey and desiccated himself to the human equivalent of a Ryvita”.
For the less printable side effects of the intimate use of Mars Bar wrappers, peanut butter and steroid cream, see the book.
Adam’s first best-seller,this Is Going To Hurt, subtitled “Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor”, sold 1.5million copies and has been commissioned as a BBC TV series.
He wrote it as “a love letter to the NHS and the NHS is rightly loved,” he says. “It was a bit of a confidence trick. People like a funny book and I had a point to make. But people don’t like to be told what to think, they want to come to their own conclusions.”
His account of 97-hour working weeks and life and death decisions is peppered with scalpel-sharp humour and laugh-outloud tales; the Kinder
Egg one is not for the faint-hearted. Several involve the “Eiffel
Syndrome” – patients claiming “I fell, doctor!
I fell!” to explain foreign objects that became, er, lodged.
Concerned readers inundated then-health
Secretary Jeremy
Hunt. The two met, briefly, but “no minds were changed”, says
Adam. New Health Secretary Matt Hancock was receptive. “He asked to meet within a week. It was productive. I focused on the mental wellbeing of staff, making sure people have a support network.”
Soon after, Hancock announced the Practitioner Health Programme and improved mental health training in the profession, namechecking the book. It was, says Adam, 39, “one of my proudest moments; the single best thing that’s happened... knowing I might have made a tangible difference”.
He continues: “They don’t teach you how to deal with the bad things at medical school.a lot of doctors turn to drink and drugs. One doctor every three weeks takes their own life.
“We’re not looking after our own.we’re putting unrealistic expectations on people and there’s a culture of not speaking about it. I thought I was the only doctor who’d ever cried in a locker room.”
Keeping a diary was his way of staying sane until he quit nine years ago.the 2016 junior doctors’ strike was the accidental catalyst for his writing career.
“They were accused of being greedy,” he says, “but you’d have to be insane to go into medicine to make money.the hospital parking meter earns more than you do.”
After they lost, he decided to read his diaries at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe to “reach 3,000 people who might feel differently. I wanted to do my bit for the next time, make a bit of a preemptive strike”.
His friend, comedian Mark Watson, came with a companion who was an editor at Picador. “She asked, ‘How much of this have you got, could it be a book?’”
Now he’s working on the TV version. “It’s billed as a comedy drama,” says Adam. “The book is neither but you can’t do a totally honest portrayal of the NHS as either a sitcom or as a harrowing drama. It sits somewhere between.”
The TV series will “put Vaseline on the lens so we don’t go to jail. The challenge is to fictionalise part of it while keeping it totally true.
I’d love the series to do the same as the book and show what it’s really like on the NHS frontline.”
He’s no fan of medical dramas, citing Jed Mercurio’s Bodies as one of the few that got it right. “ER? I wish our hospital looked like
George Clooney’s,” he laughs. “And all those complicated love triangles. The only thing I wanted to do in bed was have a nap.
“As for Doctor Foster, how has she got the time to have all these dinner parties as well as run what is essentially a part-time detective agency?”
Who will play him? “Someone better looking!” grins Adam, who looks like a cross between John Belushi and a cherub.
A doctor’s son, he specialised in obstetrics and gynaecology.the comedy began at medical school revues. “I was making fun of professors and consultants, but once you start working as a doctor there’s no time to do anything.
“When I left, comedy was the closest I had to a skill set. I’d gone from school to medical school to doctor. I had no other skills. I didn’t think it’d turn into a career. I thought I’d have six months messing around and go back.”
THE NEW book reveals why Kay quit just after he’d been promoted to senior registrar. He’d stepped in when a caesarian started to go wrong but he couldn’t save the baby.the effect was devastating, and so traumatising he couldn’t even tell his loved ones.
“For months I couldn’t do anything,” he says, and then stand-up got his life back on track.
“I didn’t love performing comedy. It’s a very lonely job, mostly it’s a driving job… drive to the gig and drive back afterwards. So I tried writing comedy.”
His first job was on the adult puppet show Mongrels in 2011. He then script-edited Mrs Brown’s Boys. “Brendan O’carroll is a wonderful entertainer, I’d never seen an audience laugh so much.” Now he appears on TV himself but says: “I don’t want to be famous – that’s the worst thing.”
Adam met his husband, Game Of Thrones casting director James Farrell, on Twitter “when it wasn’t full of Nazis”. James has been working on Jane Goldman’s Game Of Thrones prequel.
Meanwhile,adam’s stand-up is more than fun. “My shows are the safest place to be,” he says.
“Doctors, nurses and midwives come.a girl needed an ambulance and was handed over by an intensive care nurse and a neurologist…”
Whether on page, stage or TV, Adam’s message is the same: “The NHS is precious and needs to be raised above party politics.”
● Twas The Nightshift Before Christmas (Picador, £9.99)