Adam Kay's This is Going to Hurt

Then one page later blaming a woman for a failure to progress because she dared to have a birth plan

God yes I HATED the whole "silly women you can't plan a birth" nonsense.

Birth plans are important. And women aren't stupid; they know things can go wrong. But a birth plan, if nothing else, gives a woman the very important assurance that's she's in control and she's fully aware of what she wants for herself. I hate the concept of throwing birth plans out the window and just getting women to do as they're told in a painful and vulnerable state.

I cared for many women whose birth plans didn't go to plan and had birth injuries, some of which needed care weeks and months later. They would almost exclusively blame themselves. It broke my heart. But a big part of a HCP's job is to reassure their patient - and I always stressed they did nothing wrong at all, having a birth plan is the right thing to do and it not going they way they hoped is not a failure, but bad luck

[quote MsOgyny]@daisyjgrey excellent point. If medics find it lighthearted compared to what THEY would be doing, saying, thinking, and all of us mere non-medics find Adam Kay appalling, I honestly dread to think what the medics I've come across when I've been vulnerable are laughing at about me and my situation. And what they're telling their medic friends and laughing about together. Sobering.

I often feel doctors need more training in compassion, but I kind of assumed that AK was up there with the worst. Seems not.[/quote]
Ex nurse here, I worked in a gynae ward and have posted on MN before how I eventually left because I was fed up of the misogyny and objectification of female patients, and when you're a lone wolf it's a losing battle.

I can assure you that, despite the sexism, I've never heard anyone laughing about a patient with a colleague - unless it was a funny "they told this great joke" kind of thing. It would not have been appropriate and this is one of the reasons I hated Kay's book

I thought his book was pretty misogynistic, he spoke about women like they were just vessels. Did not sit well with me

Yup. Misogynist who would never consider himself to be one. A nasty man.

They keep getting worse - Menstrual Rag and Northern Birds are horrible, but Nothing At All is even worse.
And his song about a child with Down's Syndrome is just off the charts unspeakably horrible.

However bad you expect the lyrics to his songs to be, they're much worse. The way he refers to women is shocking, and even if it's for laughs, that doesn't come from nowhere.
www.ouvirmusica.com.br/amateur-transplants/1490089/

As I mentioned earlier, many arrogant young registrars (and I include myself) have a medical disaster or near miss early in their career.
Most of us find our humility and become better doctors thereafter. We realise we are not God, that we cannot cure everything, and that mistakes happen.
Kay does not seem to be able to make that adjustment. He left medicine instead. I think that speaks volumes.

Plus, being a dr doesn't automatically make you a good one, or indeed, a good person.

I don’t think it’s saying that he didn’t care about his patients, but that he came across as thinking thought he knew best to the point of being dismissive, particularly of women’s health.

I thought it was really funny in places. I enjoyed it.

The thing is, if Adam Kay hadn’t cared about his patients, wouldn’t he just have carried on working? After all, he was close to becoming a consultant and according to him, the consultants were well-paid and had an easy life.

However, Kay struggled to come to terms with a particular tragedy, especially due to the lack of support from the NHS. IIRC, he became too risk-averse and too quick to opt for caesarean deliveries. He felt he was no longer able to offer his patients the best care, so he resigned.

My brother gave me this for Christmas, will have to read it now.

Please rethink your career if you think this is an acceptable way to treat patients, regardless of the size of the workload.

You're dealing with humans. Not cars. Humans.

I also doubt it was the workload or environment that made him that way, he probably brought a lot of his attitudes with him.

And AK did, in that sense, do the professionally responsible thing in the wnd. He didn’t have to write a “humorous” book about it though

knightinshiningwhatever, I was a hospital doctor for 36 years and I beg to differ.
My colleagues and I worked worse rotas than Kay with worse caseloads (84 hour shifts with no break, covering 100 surgical beds plus emergency admissions when newly qualified, for example) - we did not become misogynistic shits.

Ive worked in acute medicine for a while and I think he's not misogynistic he's just a doctor dealing with a massive workload

I hated the book. Wasn’t funny and completely arrogant & incompetent. No wonder he left the profession

Also, there’s a pretty reasonable chance she’ll have seen him being lauded for his bestseller book, to add insult to injury.

That woman must have felt desperate. Poor woman getting prescribed antidepressants vs a diagnosis and treatment for a gynecological medical condition. We’re not so far from women being treated for ‘wandering uterus’ here - ‘hysteria’ 😩

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wandering_womb

What a male specimen eh? They're normally the type to create lyrics like that. Those Adonises.

I pretty much read that book in one afternoon while fairly inebriated on holiday and though there was some humour I remember cringing more than once e.g. the sponge/vagina thing. Vile.

www.madbitches.club/journal/this-is-going-to-hurt
This is a good article about his entry on the woman experiencing pelvic pain and pretty much sums up why that bit was one of the entries I hated most from the book.
I’m glad to see a lot of responses on this thread in agreement about the misogyny in the book, as I said previously I really think it will date badly.

I don’t have the book to hand, but if I remember rightly, he made a bigger surgical incision than necessary which decapitated the dolphin, then deliberately sewed up the wound in a way that meant the dolphin’s head no longer lined up with its body. I don’t think that was OK, even if the patient was racist and obnoxious.