This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor by Adam Kay
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
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I dreaded reading this book with its slapstick title. And from somewhere I got the impression that the author was now a comedian. It looked and sounded as though it was going to be awful. So I just downloaded the free sample to my Kindle and quickly read through it. It was truly obnoxious. Autobiographical, yes, but narcissistic, arrogant, self-important twaddle. And so offensive! I was appalled at the descriptions of patients as "bed-blocking fuckers". And that was mild compared to descriptions of female anatomy from an Obstetrics and Gynaecology Junior Doctor who seemed to treat patients as so much meat. It was horrible. I determined not to buy it so that I could avoid reading the rest of it. After a couple of weeks, in conversation about book club, someone asked me what we were reading this month and I felt a pang of guilt about not reading it; I read out a passage to her that was particularly obnoxious. She agreed. But then, I re-read the immediately preceding passage and wondered why I hadn't noticed the empathy and sensitivity in it. I looked again at what I had read and realized that I had ignored everything except the sarcasm and rudeness, having judged the book by its cover. I then paid for the whole Kindle book and resolved to read it. I soon got into the swing of it I found myself looking forward to reading it each day. While it was not a laugh-out-loud book there were a couple of passages that made me smile and one that actually made me laugh. His empathy for patients eventually shone through. I was constantly appalled by the conditions in which doctors have to work and by the dreadful way that management and politics conspired to continuously make the NHS worse, almost as if it were deliberate. It was an eye-opener. By the time I finished, I was glad that I had read it, but my brain feels ravaged and mangled. It is a raw and harsh book, but feels like an honest and frank account of what it feels like to work as a doctor in a hospital. Oh, and I learned more than I wanted to about female anatomy! Still, quite an experience to read it.
