This Is Going To Hurt By Adam Kay

This Is Going To Hurt is a heart-touching book written by an ex-doctor, Adam Kay. This book was almost like his personal diary, including all his thoughts and incidents that he encountered as a doctor, written to highlight the reality and the true nature of a medical career that many sitcoms and dramas masked. I personally found the book heart warming, saddening and also inspiring and would honestly recommend it to anyone planning to studying medicine. It is an excellent book and sheds much needed light on the daily existence of our healthcare staff. 

This Is Going To Hurt comprises a series of diary entries from the life of a junior doctor: Adam Kay. Kay emphasises the highs and lows he came across during his 6 years as a doctor. From the ludicrous and hilarious encounters to the heartbreaking moments, despite the depressing content of the book, it is ‘painfully funny’. This book is a much-needed, candid, unfiltered look at the life of an NHS worker. With the huge workload and stress being the norm, Kay hyperbolised the harsh journey a doctor has to endure, from being a ‘glorified receptionist’ to being the doctor in charge. The humorous tone contrasted harmoniously with the dark and serious contents of the book and this highlights how a doctor should be prepared to face hardships and how the road to becoming a doctor is not necessarily the smoothest, something totally different than what was conveyed by the entertainment industry. 

The raw and gritty truth also gave me a newly found respect for all medics as it underscores that doctors are human too. Doctors are not robots who perform miracles with a click of their fingers, but are humans who work long, fatiguing hours and search up things on the internet to help them, and certainly can not be replaced by WebMD.  With sleepless nights and weekends almost non-existent, This Is Going To Hurt allows me to witness first hand the endless dedication the doctors have to improve their patients’ lives. I, personally, was always intimidated by the perfect persona the stereotypical doctors held, and made me question whether I was capable of becoming a doctor. However, after reading this book, I became aware that a doctor’s life is a continuous journey of learning, and that even the most professional doctors are sometimes unsure. After all, all doctors are humans.

However, contrasting the humorous tone of the book, the ending of the nonfiction novel was rather depressing and sad. The comical tone dissipated entirely as Kay came onto the topic as to why he had to leave his position as a medical worker. The book emphasised how a doctor won’t be able to save every patient and that a doctor must be prepared to take responsibility if anything were to happen to his/her patient. Death is a tragedy that a doctor must be ready to face. However, don’t get me wrong. Doctors aren’t cold-blooded creatures that do not care about the deaths of their patient. Doctors merely should be aware of the fact that death is something that is inevitable in their career, something they can never forget, but have to move on from. Adam Kay mentions the death of one of his patients. This was different from before. Kay was the senior doctor and he had no one to put the blame on, no one to push the responsibility towards. Kay couldn’t handle the death, though he desperately tried to bury it in his mind, and ultimately led him to quit, ending his six year journey as a doctor. 

This book brings to the fore, the sheer operational mountain of running a hospital. Kay embraces how the miracles performed by doctors and nurses are almost dwarfed by the problems of missing a get-together planned by his friends whilst unravelling the hard and underappreciated life of a doctor. The book has its funny moments, a good mixture of laughter and long unspoken truth and stories that shouldn’t have never left the hospital ward. However, I would describe the book as more poignant than comic. The NHS system relies almost totally on the Hercules shoulders of the medical workers, like Adam Kay, whose compassion motivates miracles and makes it possible to cope with an inhuman workload.