Laugh out loud funny and cry yourself to sleep heartbreaking.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐⭐
The Blurb:
Adam Kay was a junior doctor from 2004 until 2010, before a devastating experience on a ward caused him to reconsider his future.
He kept a diary throughout his training, and This Is Going to Hurt intersperses tales from the front line of the NHS with reflections on the current crisis.
The result is a first-hand account of life as a junior doctor in all its joy, pain, sacrifice and maddening bureaucracy, and a love letter to those who might at any moment be holding our lives in their hands
The Review
This was hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measures. It's chock to the brim full of riotous anecdotes about those special conversations that can really only happen between Patient and Doctor - specifically a Doctor who is an obstetrician & gynaecologist. (Especially if you are partial to a funny story about objects being stuck in certain.....orifices and the excuses that people try to give to explain these. I, for one, can never get enough of that type of story!)
And when I say hilarious - I mean it was actually the kind of funny that makes you guffaw out loud. And then insist that your significant other stop what they are doing and read said section that made you laugh so much. Kay is never cruel when relaying these anecdotes, and somehow manages to turn even the most despairing of moments on its head and show you the funny side of life.
Most of us know that Doctors (and pretty much all health professionals in the NHS ) work their arses off for us. I used to work behind the scenes in a Medical School, so I certainly know the pressure that trainee Doctors have on them right from the off. But I don't think I had realised how little recognition they get for it. As Kay relates, they work incredibly unsociable hours, get paid a pittance (relative to other careers where you don't hold people's lives in your hands), sacrifice their relationships by putting their job continually above their personal life - and they DON'T have a choice in any of this. It definitely made me evaluate how I feel about the expectations we have of Doctors.
(On a side note, a colleague and I were discussing train drivers, who sadly are affected if someone decides to take their own life by jumping in front of a train. Hugely traumatic. They are given 6 months off paid apparently. I am not for a second suggesting this isn't appropriate, but compare it to the devastating case that forces Adam Kay to eventually leave the Health Service. Expectation for them is to come back into work the next day as if nothing happened - just how can that be right?!)
Anyway, before I get lost in a huge political rant about the NHS and its undervalued employees, back to the book review. This book is EXCELLENT. Witty, insightful, brutally honest, tongue in cheek and heartbreaking. Everybody should read it and can someone PLEASE throw it at Jeremy Hunt's head and see if it knocks *any* sense into him?
And as a final note - can I say thank you. The NHS would not exist if it were not for the goodwill of Doctors, nurses, healthcare assistants etc. that treat it as a vocation rather than a job. Let's take a scary minute to think about what would happen if any of them decided to actually go home on time for once. You are all real life heroes. Thank you.
Comments