They struggle at home, with their spouses/partners, their children. They struggle at work they care for others but nobody cares for them. The forty-eight-hour weekend blast of unremitting hedonism that bankers and lawyers might indulge in remains beyond a medic’s budget and their schedule. They spend money only on necessities like petrol, coffee and takeaway pizzas. They may move up the professional ladder by appearing for exams but this in no way means an increase in salary.

It is quite possible for them to earn less than train drivers, McDonald’s staff, even parking metres. In the middle of such narratives, Kay sheds light on the tough reality of being a doctor in contemporary Britain. She ended up being diagnosed with a certain “pelvic inflammatory disease”. For instance, a woman in her mid-fifties, who, upon discovering on her wedding anniversary that she wasn’t the only person to have received a pearl necklace from her husband, went off to Trinidad and Tobago to have sex with as many men as she could over the course of a fortnight.

Kay provides us with specific stories from his patients. Then-because of the author’s chosen field-there is a large number of conditions and emergencies related to vaginas, penises, uteruses, fallopian tubes and ovaries-some funny and disgusting, others utterly depressing. He gives an endless list of medical terms (my favourite was “cyberchondriacs”: those individuals who come to hospital under the misapprehension they’re in any way ill because of something they’ve read online). This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor by Adam Kay (2017, Picador) Specialising in obstetrics and gynecology, he found himself working 97 hours per week, being compelled to make difficult life and death decisions within seconds, encountering horrors that have scarred his retinas forever. Thirty-seven-year-old Adam Kay ( Website, Twitter, Facebook)-NHS junior doctor turned performer and comedy writer for film and TV-has come up with a wildly hilarious and heavily informative memoir titled This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor describing the years he spent in his former profession.īorn into a Jewish family full of medics, Kay didn’t need to think twice before deciding on his career. Examples: “NHS staff ‘quitting to work in supermarkets because of poor pay'”, “Soaring NHS vacancies prompt warnings of ‘desperate’ understaffing”, “Brexit won’t help the NHS, it will destroy it”, “NHS junior doctors to stage five consecutive days of strikes in September”. If you are a regular reader of the Guardian, you must have encountered several articles on the trials and tribulations of NHS (the UK’s National Health Service, its lifeline) workers-low pay, intense pressure, understaffing, long hours, etc., etc.

This is going to hurt author