Introduction - i: Introduction Chapter - 1: House Officer Chapter - 2: Senior House Officer Post 1 Chapter - 3: Senior House Officer Post 2 Chapter - 4: Senior House Officer Post 3 Chapter - 5: Registrar Post 1 Chapter - 6: Registrar Post 2 Chapter - 7: Registrar Post 3 Chapter - 8: Registrar Post 4 Chapter - 9: Senior Registrar Chapter - 10: Aftermath Section - ii: An Open Letter to the Secretary of State for Health Acknowledgements - iii: Acknowledgements
The often hilarious, at times horrifying and occasionally heartbreaking diaries of a former junior doctor, and the story of why he decided to hang up his stethoscope
Adam Kay is a writer and script editor for TV and film. During his transition from doctor to writer he established himself as a musical comedian as frontman of Amateur Transplants, achieving great success and over 20 million YouTube hits. He lives in London.
Painfully funny. The pain and the funniness somehow add up to
something entirely good, entirely noble and entirely loveable.
*Stephen Fry*
I'm not a Doctor (despite what I sometimes say) but I’d prescribe
this book to anyone and everyone. It's laugh-out-loud funny,
heartbreakingly sad and gives you the lowdown on what it’s like to
be holding it together while serving on the front line of our
beloved but beleaguered NHS. It’s wonderful
*Jonathan Ross*
Finally a true picture of the harrowing, hilarious and ultimately
chaotic life of the junior doctor in all its gory glory, dark
comedy and unavoidable sadness. A blisteringly funny account shot
through with harrowing detail, many pertinent truths and the
humanity we all hope doctors conceal behind their unflappable
exteriors.
*Jo Brand*
As hilarious as it is heartbreaking – and it IS heartbreaking (also
hilarious)
*Charlie Brooker*
Unputdownable. You must read this book if you like reading, like
laughing or love our NHS. It’s a spit-your-tea-out-laughing clarion
call to stand up for our junior doctors with all our might
*Shappi Khorsandi*
What an amazing book. I laughed so hard and often I nearly choked,
but it’s also very moving and important. Everyone should read
it.
*Cathy Rentzenbrink*
By turns hilarious, shocking, heartbreaking and humbling
*John Niven*
Much like the NHS itself, this book is filled with hope, despair,
miracles, catastrophe and acres of the sharpest gallows humour. A
very funny book with a very sobering message
*Chris Addison*
Horrifyingly hilarious and hilariously horrifying
*Danny Wallace*
This is a ferociously funny book, but beneath the sheen of
brilliant one-liners is a passionate, acutely personal examination
of what the health service does for us, and what we're in danger of
doing to it
*Mark Watson*
As a hypochondriac I was worried about reading Adam Kay’s book.
Luckily it’s incredibly funny – so funny, in fact, that it gave me
a hernia from laughing
*Joe Lycett*
A scurrilously funny, poignant and fascinatingly horrific tale of
being torn to pieces and spat out by the strangely loveable but
graceless monster that is the NHS
*Milton Jones*
If we lose the NHS, Adam Kay’s diary of his him as a junior doctor
will become a historical record of a unique, empathy-powered
machine, and make it not just one of the funniest books I’ve ever
read, but one of the saddest, too
*David Whitehouse*
What a hilarious, stomach-churning, thought-provoking heartbreaker
of a book. I loved every single page
*Jill Mansell*
Superb. Unusual and funny and sad
*Pam Ayres*
By turns witty, gruesome, alarming, and touching. Always
illuminating and searingly honest
*Jonathan Dimbleby*
This should be required reading for anyone who works in, uses or
even voices an opinion about the NHS. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry,
you’ll laugh some more, you’ll think twice about ever
reproducing
*Dean Burnett, author of The Idiot Brain*
Hilarious from the first page – very, very funny. I loved it
*Kit Wharton, author of Emergency Admissions*
This made me laugh out loud and cry in equal measures. Adam's book
weaves in and out of his patients’ lives and in so doing he tells,
in a better narrative than I have ever seen before, of the pain and
joy of working so close to despair, disease and death. It's a quite
brilliant book and will soothe the sorrows of many junior (and
senior) doctors and remind us all why we entered this wonderful
profession. A must read for patients too - lifting the bonnet on
the working life of your jobbing hospital doctor
*Prof Clare Gerada MBE, past chair of the Royal College of General
Practitioners*
An urgent, devastating yet truly funny account of life at the
coalface of the NHS. This Is Going to Hurt had me laughing, crying
and open-mouthed — in horror and in awe — by turn of page
*Lisa Owens, author of Not Working*
Hilarious, poignant, depressing and shocking. Kay is such a
brilliantly talented writer he manages to be both deadly serious
and hilarious at the same time. Piles of this book should be in
every GP surgery waiting room and A&E department in the
country. Heartbreaking, dazzling, brutally honest
*Bridget Christie*
Things I have done while reading this book: laughed aloud (too many
times to count), read a passage to a stranger on a train (this was
perhaps inadvisable but could not be helped), been consistently
bowled over by the detail of Dr Kay's sharp prose & remarkably
observant journey in a job so many of us have no real understanding
of. It's an important book, a boots-on-the-ground memoir true to
its title—but it's a good hurt I was left with upon turning the
last page, the kind that resonates with empathy and consequence
*Ryan Gattis, author of Safe and All Involved*
Stayed up half the night laughing out loud over painfully smart,
honest doctor diaries
*Emma Donoghue, author of Room*
Funny, tragic, uplifting and brimming with bodily fluids (sorry) .
. . Kay makes for a compelling bedfellow as he explores the
terrifying world of the amazing men and women (just about) holding
the NHS together
*Stylist*
Hilarious and heartbreaking . . . I howled, yelped and occasionally
choked with laughter . . . It’s an invigorating addition to the
vogue for medical memoirs. I like to think of it sitting on a shelf
next to Henry Marsh, Atul Gawande and Paul Kalanithi, turning the
air bluer and bluer. It has something of all those writers, but
with an added dash of a profane Adrian Mole . . . This book may
hurt, but in an important and necessary way
*The Times*
Blisteringly funny, politically enraging and often heartbreaking .
. . hilarious . . . There is also a huge amount of pathos . . .
This is a book brimming not just with humour but with humanity. Kay
describes with visceral honesty the sacrifices made by junior
doctors . . . This should be a wake-up call to all who value the
NHS
*Sunday Express*
A heartening, laugh-out-loud confessional on the indignities and
quiet joys of being a junior doctor . . . Anchoring the wisecracks
is Kay’s heartfelt respect for Britain’s junior doctors and the
ignoble realities of a noble profession. At a time of anxiety over
the future of the NHS, Kay’s warts-and-all account will not only
bring plenty of laughs but also delivers a moving report from the
NHS’s embattled frontline’
*Financial Times*
Hilarious . . . a complete eye-opener
*Red*
Laugh-out-loud funny . . . I found myself laughing in horror over
and over, but Kay’s poignant final act brought me to tears. This is
a valuable window into the life of a junior doctor that should be
required reading for all
*Stylist*
This is a brilliant book
*Russell Howard*
Brilliant
*Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the
Night-Time*
All of human life is contained in these diaries . . . hilarious,
horrifying
*Prima*
The humour is unflinching in its darkness . . . Yet I did laugh. A
lot. Kay is a skilful, muscular writer, his narrative swinging from
laugh-out- loud anecdotes to tales of sheer horror. The book’s
title is harrowingly apt . . . In the end, this book is a call to
arms. That the NHS lost Kay is a tragedy. That this diary was
written well before the Government’s battle with junior doctors is
more disturbing
still’
*Independent*
At once hilarious and shocking, moving and irreverent, This Is
Going to Hurt is a book that demands to be read. Adam Kay’s deft
comic tone is a brilliant counterpoint to his most serious of
intents: to impress upon us the importance of the NHS in our lives
and the irreversible damage being inflicted upon it by indifferent
governments.
*Maggie O’Farrell*
Brutally funny . . . jaw-dropping
*New Statesman*
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