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

by Adam Kay

It is an established fact that hospital death rates go up on Black Wednesday. Knowing this really takes the pressure off, so I’m not trying very hard.

slightly low-rent X-Man (my words).

I’m pretty sure this isn’t the protocol at Google or General Motors or even at grocery stores. Is there a single other workplace where you’d conceivably be asked to arrange your own sickness cover?

just about 90% of American companies.

The magic potion I need to drink to take me to the next level of that Dungeons and Dragons game I abandoned twenty-four years ago?

Plus I was able to sleep with one of her grandchildren.*

According to the notes, this lady was in her midfifties and had discovered on her wedding anniversary that she wasn’t the only person to have received a pearl necklace from her husband. Her reaction was seemingly straight out of niche porn—she took herself and her husband’s credit card off to Trinidad and Tobago and had sex with as many men as she could over the course of a fortnight, expanding her bedroom (and beach) repertoire to include anal sex.

put my hand up and ask what happens if the patient already has a tattoo of an arrow on the wrong leg. Decent laugh from the lecture hall and my consultant calls me a fucking clown.

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

shoogling

I have no idea what the moral of this story is.

If they’re updating the Hippocratic oath any time soon, they should add in a line about never mentioning you’re a doctor at parties.

“I’m a doctor, by the way.”

“Well, we weren’t always quite so honest with the patients back then.”

abstain from sex altogether for the first month after treatment. She pauses to consider this before asking, “How about anal?”*

I deflect with “I only know about vaginas, pal,”

This is a database of every time they’ve had sex since coming off contraception alongside the dates of Milly’s cycle and, distressingly, the length of the session and who was on top.

On the plus side, three of us have had sex with nurses, one of us while at work, so it’s not all bad.

Two weeks for a dead dog, though—the woman’s fucking nuts.

I did mind but didn’t really have much choice—it presumably takes quite a lot of nerve to ask one of your teachers to look at your dick. (Except in porn, where it seems to happen fairly regularly.)

I text my mum to ask if she by any chance still has that game of Operation tucked away in a drawer. She replies to say she’s found it. She also has a Magic 8-Ball, she tells me, in case I need it for my diagnoses.

totally lied about the christening, though—fuck that shit.

“Jack Daniel’s is fucking cat piss.”

I was slightly weirded out the first time a patient started texting during an internal examination, but now it seems reasonably common. Today, during a pap smear, a patient FaceTimed her friend.

He’s going down to the shops; would I like anything? I half want to see his reaction if I ask for a BLT, a bottle of Smirnoff, and some poppers.