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

by Adam Kay

First vacuum-extraction delivery. I suddenly feel like an obstetrician—it’s a pretty notional job title until you can, you know, actually extract a baby. My registrar, Lily, talks me through it gently, but I do it all myself and it feels fucking great. “Congratulations, you did amazingly well there,” says Lily. “Thank you!” I reply, then realize she’s actually talking to the mum.

When the deanery rolled the dice for the second time, however, I found myself in a much more old-fashioned hospital. If you describe a grandparent as being old-fashioned, it’s a euphemism for “casually racist.” In a hospital setting, it means “unsupportive.” You’re on your own.

Waited until the radio station had moved on to the next song before making the uterine incision for a cesarean. As appropriate as Cutting Crew may be for a surgeon, I refuse to deliver a baby to the refrain of “I just died in your arms tonight.”

We’re repeatedly reminded not to use empty patient rooms to catch any sleep overnight—the management maintains we’re paid to work full shifts. I want to ask the management if they’ve heard of that big ball of fire in the sky that makes it slightly harder to sleep during the day than at night? Or how easy they think it is to suddenly switch from working during the day and sleeping at night to the exact opposite within twenty-four hours? But most of all I want to ask if they or their wives needed an emergency cesarean section at seven a.m., would they rather the registrar doing it had caught forty minutes’ sleep when things were quiet or had been forced to stay awake every second of the shift?