This Is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Young Doctor

by Adam Kay

parochial

The extra mile was the normal distance.

Personally, I don’t remember medicine ever being an active career decision; it was more just the default setting for my

They must have something that cannot be memorized and graded; a great doctor must have a huge heart and a distended aorta through which pumps a vast lake of compassion and human kindness.

gargantuan

I don’t particularly know what I’m doing, and I don’t have vast depths of confidence even when I do,

dignitary’s

So there we go, the first death I’ve ever witnessed and every bit as horrific as it could possibly have been. Nothing romantic or beautiful about it.

rosette,

Night shifts are essentially a different time zone to the rest of the country,

malingerer

senior house officer—or first-year resident,

paracetamol

Senior house officer is the point at which you decide what to specialize in.

antiphospholipid syndrome,

the depth of the lows is the price you pay for the height of the highs.

Cherry well and truly popped, and with a live audience.

myomectomy.*

she tells me that Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t celebrate birthdays or even receive presents. This is even more fucked up than the whole blood thing.

“So, there are two main drugs that anesthesiologists give. First, a paralytic, so that the surgeon can have a proper fiddle-around. With the body completely paralyzed, you can’t breathe unassisted, which is why you get hooked up to a ventilator during the procedure. The second drug’s a cloudy fluid called propofol that makes you unconscious, so you’re asleep throughout the procedure.

Scilly Isles.

deaneries

roebuck,

I rapidly learned to maintain an air of absolute confidence no matter how frantically my legs were paddling under the water.

fortnight.

I’ve been holding on to a glimmer of hope that I might knock off work early one day—if the hospital burned down, say, or nuclear war was declared.

et cetera.

moussaka

hypodermic

plasterer,

The difference is obviously the whole life-and-death thing, which is what separates this job from all others and makes it so unfathomable to people on the outside.

“Hemophiliac!”

realize people everywhere moan about their salaries and think they deserve more,

(Pacemakers explode during the process, taking with them entire crematoria and congregations, as one family presumably found out during a particularly stressful funeral.)

All physicians come to grips with the lack of promotion and financial incentives, but it’s harder to accept the fact that it’s rare to get a “well done.”

plaudits

When one of them said thank you, you knew they meant it—even if it felt like it wasn’t for anything special,

quid

monsoons

impotence

registrar = fellow)

hedonism.

The population is getting fatter faster than a mobility scooter hurtling toward McDonald’s at closing time.

infinitesimal,

Sometimes it’s the little things that make a difference on the labor ward.

diathermy,*

Now, slightly more desensitized to a thing you can never quite believe you’ll ever become desensitized to, I can look.

lipodystrophy

Everything about it is so thoughtful, the kind of thing that makes the whole job totally worthwhile.

anecdote.