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

by Adam Kay

A ship that’s enormous, and on fire, and that no one has really taught you how to sail.

don’t particularly know what I’m doing, and I don’t have vast depths of confidence even when I do, so it’s actually quite helpful to have a superannuated German cheerleader behind me shouting out, ‘Zat is brilliant!’ every so often. Today he took a dump on the floor next to me so I sadly had to retire him from active duty.

Start looking for the patient’s stopcock? Shove loads of kitchen roll down his throat? Float some basil in it and declare it gazpacho?

‘Apricot stones contain cyanide,’ he replies drily. ‘The death cap mushroom has a fifty per cent fatality rate. Natural does not equal safe. There’s a plant in my garden where if you simply sat under it for ten minutes then you’d be dead.’ Job done: she bins the tablets. I ask him about that plant over a colonoscopy later. ‘Water lily.’

This week I have seen H for under two hours and worked for a grand total of ninety-seven.

Non-compliant doesn’t quite seem to cover it. My contract has taken the directive, dragged it screaming from its bed in the dead of night and waterboarded it.

‘Well, you’ve bought him another couple of weeks on earth.’ Come on – give a superhero a break here.

clearly need to dress smarter if that’s the level of bribe I’m attracting.

Recreate the experience for yourself by tying your shoelaces with chopsticks. With your eyes closed. In space.

‘Are you joking?’ he replied. ‘I’ll get bloody MRSA in here.’ It’s come to something when the streets outside a hospital have a better reputation for cleanliness than the corridors within.

feel like running a teaching session for the orthopaedic department entitled, ‘Sometimes people fall over for a reason’.

Both his arms are in full plaster casts, like a Scooby Doo villain. He’s got no drip for fluids and an untouched glass of water on his bedside table that – despite all the will in the world, I’m sure – physics has prevented him from touching for the past couple of days.

prescribe IV fluids for the patient, though it would be more efficient to prescribe common sense for some of my colleagues.

Less than a year as a doctor and this is the fourth object I have removed from a rectum – professionally, at least.

Most of these patients suffer from Eiffel Syndrome – ‘I fell, doctor! I fell!’ – and the tales of how things get where can be skyscraper tall (come to think of it, it’s only a matter of time before someone tries to sit on the Gherkin),

I told a patient that his MRI wouldn’t be until next week and he threatened to break both my legs. My first thought was, ‘Well, it’ll be a couple of weeks off work.’ I was this close to offering to find him a baseball bat.

(Orthopaedics is basically reserved for the med school’s rugby team – it’s barely more than sawing and nailing – and I suspect they don’t ‘sign up’ for it so much as dip their hand in ink and provide a palm print.)

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

She complains of a large number of painless spots on her tongue. Diagnosis: taste buds.

Ernie hasn’t apologized to me, as that would require him to change his entire personality.

I was rather hoping Kay Syndrome might be a more glamorous discovery than someone shitting themselves inside out during induction of labour, but perhaps it’s a price worth paying for immortalization in the textbooks.

as happens eleven times out of ten when the hospital tries to make life easier, they’ve made everything much more complicated.

Parents seem to think obstetricians are wise owls with expert knowledge of infants, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. We know the square root of fuck all about them, save for a few half-remembered semi-facts from medical school. Once a baby’s no longer umbilically attached to its mother, we hand them over and never deal with them again until they’re old enough to procreate.

‘Fine,’ he said with the kind of weary, simmering passive-aggression I normally only get at home.

I’m not entirely sure where these extra couple of hours a day are going to come from – either I need to give up my frivolous hobby of sleeping or cut out my commute by living in a store cupboard at work.

seemingly there’s some pretty weapons-grade gonorrhoea going round the Caribbean.

The phrase ‘women’s problems’ alone – especially if delivered in hushed tones while staring straight into his eyes – will have him changing the subject immediately, even if he has to start a small fire as a distraction.

Saturday, 30 June 2007 A news story in the paper about a hospital porter who’s been jailed for pretending to be a doctor for the last few years.

Except there are a dozen chickens, they’re all delivering triplets and the boat’s made of sugar.

She explains how natural it is among other mammals, which is another somewhat defective argument – we don’t let other mammals do things like run for parliament or drive buses, nor do we normalize other things they do like fucking the furniture or eating their young (or ‘paedophagia’, as she’d presumably call it).

I immediately felt bad – I’d hate him to think I didn’t trust him to do his job properly (which I don’t),

Icke is a professional conspiracy theorist and Holocaust denier, who puts on inexorably long, mad speeches. By the time this book is published he’ll no doubt be foreign secretary.

There may well be a light at the end of the tunnel, but the tunnel is eighty-five miles long, crammed full of impacted faeces, and I have to eat my way out of it.

I don’t have time to wait for Satan to put on gloves and a North Face jacket,

Today a notice has appeared in the changing rooms: ‘Staff must under no circumstances wear Crocs footwear as the holes do not provide adequate protection from falling sharps.’ A frustrated personal stylist has added underneath, ‘And they make you look like a douche’.

This patient’s got ‘strongly worded email’ written all over her,

You don’t cure depression, the same way you don’t cure asthma; you manage it. I’m the inhaler he’s decided to go with and I should be pleased he’s gone this long without an attack.

beggars can’t be choosers; I’d have accepted a bed with a grand piano dangling from the ceiling above it by a single pube if there was any chance of some shuteye.

The computer denies knowledge of almost every patient – we’d be better off with tarot cards.

In truth, they’re behaving equally despicably, but given she’s currently in labour – a famously non-fun process – I have to award him 100 per cent of the bastard points.

Mistake corrected and baby delivered safely. (By me – at this point I wouldn’t trust the registrar to deliver a limerick.)

Even though they’ve got a stethoscope round their neck and a decent line in gallows humour, they’re still just that teenager who arbitrarily put a tick next to ‘medicine’ on their UCAS form. Just a human as fragile as anyone.

but to my mind, the only condition homeopathy can actually treat is thirst. Or being on fire, if applied topically.

Life is one long fucking pub quiz and I am never on the right team.