In 2010, after six years of training and six more on the wards, Adam Kay hung up his stethoscope. A few months earlier, while he was a senior registrar in obstetrics and gynaecology (or “brats and twats” as it’s apparently known), he had had to deal with a complicated birth in which the baby died. The mother was losing blood by the litre and needed an emergency hysterectomy to save her life.
As Kay’s diary of his time as a junior doctor so eloquently shows, medics are used to tragedy. But this awful experience scarred him. It was the last straw after regularly having to work more than 90 hours a week (“the parking meters outside the hospital are on a better hourly rate”) and dealing with everything from “itchy teeth” and patients who FaceTime their friends during smear tests to extracting foreign objects from rectums (remote controls, toilet brushes). Kay is now a comedy writer, and his frank and excruciatingly funny book, inspired by the 2016 junior doctors’ dispute, is also a moving tribute to the people without whom the NHS couldn’t function.
