Adam Kay: ‘If I had kids I would put them off studying medicine’

The comedian’s memoir about his gruelling years as a junior doctor has fired up public indignation over the NHS’s future. Even Jeremy Hunt has heard about it…

The morning I was due to interview Adam Kay I awoke with heavy flu symptoms and a painfully frozen neck and shoulder. I was in perspiring agony and, even before I got out of bed, utterly exhausted. But I thought: what would a junior doctor do? Of course, if he or she were suffering from flu, the correct answer would be: not go anywhere near a hospital. But that’s not the sense you get from Kay’s bestselling diary of his time as a doctor training in obstetrics and gynaecology – or, as it was referred to at his medical school, brats and twats.

In This Is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor, hospital doctors, and in particular the author, are depicted as poorly paid, undervalued and grossly neglected professionals who are unfailingly willing to give up their own time for free to do battle with the health of the nation. That is, when they’re not trading stories about their patients’ bizarre sexual proclivities.

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Continue reading... December 10, 2017 at 03:00PM