This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor

by Adam Kay

I send him home and call the consultant to ask what to do, knowing full well the answer involves me working another twelve hours for free.

How long until we’re seeing girls stapling their vaginas tighter?*

(Or maybe he’s actually the devil and I should have just shoved him back in.)

‘It’s funny – you don’t think of doctors getting ill.’ It’s true, and I think it’s part of something bigger: patients don’t actually think of doctors as being human.

Today, during a smear test, a patient FaceTimed her friend.

A couple of centimetres higher and I’d have taken her eye out, a couple of millimetres deeper and I could have caused scarring and blood loss.

Almost a decade previously, I worked at the same hospital as a medical secretary during university holidays. We were obliged to take a twenty-minute break after every two hours of staring at a computer screen because of ‘health and safety’.

Feels appropriate that work commitments mean I have to reschedule collecting all my belongings from the flat.

Roger Fisher was a professor of law at Harvard University, who suggested back in 1981 that they should implant the American nuclear codes in the heart of a volunteer. If the President wanted to press the big red button and kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people, then first he’d have to take a butcher’s knife and dig it out of the volunteer’s chest himself; so that he realizes what death actually means first-hand, and understands the implications of his actions. Because the President would never press the button if he had to do that.