To think This Is Going To Hurt is awful to women?

[justanoldhack]

Watching the show and can't help but shake a really uncomfortable feeling that its writer just...really doesn't like women.

I get that doctors are super overstretched, so tired, giving the job everything at the expense of their personal lives. I also get that it's a 'comedy' and not real, although it is based on his true life experiences.

But the way the women are portrayed as silly, a nuisance, stupid, battleaxes, or simply a vessel that 'covers his pubes in blood'... feels so off. These are women at one of the most vulnerable moments in their lives, but they're just props, the butt of the jokes. I can't shake the feeling that Adam Kay really, really doesn't like women. Definitely does not respect them.

Thanks goodness, I guess, that he's not longer practicing medicine. And not surprised either to learn that when he was younger he wrote 'comedy' songs about babies with Down's Syndrome and women from the North.

Perhaps he should go into men’s health on his return to medicine and we can look forward to a number of ‘hilarious’ anecdotes about enlarged prostates and ripped foreskins.

TBF I think pathology would probably be the best fit for him.

@RosesAndHellebores

I've said it before and will say it again. The general.public need to stop being grateful for sub optimal clinical care and pastoral care that leaves too much to be desired. The NHS is funded by the people, for the people. It is not free, it is free at the point of delivery and in no other sector would people accept the manner in which some NHS staff behave towards them.

The actuals may appear a tiny proportion of GDP but what isn't factored in is the time the public have to spend to access care. Dealing with incorrect diagnoses, referrals that are inaccurate, referrals made without the requires tests in place (wasting cli ical and patient time), the 20 minutes or so it takes the NHS to pick up a phone. I had a misdiagnosis in the late summer. I think k it has taken me 35 hours of my time to begin to get it sorted. It still isn't. And this against a backdrop of infantilisation and condescension.

Vive la revolution.

I agree. The NHS needs radical reform.

it’s very fucked up how heavily birth without pain relief is pushed

Pushed by the NCT. On the whole, It tends to be women who evangelise about “natural” childbirth.

FGS it wasn’t meant to be a documentary, personally I really enjoyed it

One of my family members is a midwife. She also tells funny (anonymised) stories of her various encounters. Some funny, some gross, some sad. I'm surprised people are surprised. surely it's only misogyny if he's taking the piss out of them because they're women. He's taking the piss out of them because they're his patients. I don't suppose he included all the lovely, sensible patients because that wouldn't make a good book. He's taking six years of funny encounters - well, not funny to some obviously - and condensing them into one short book or six episodes.

Absolutely @Chimchiminie. My DC are 27 and 23. At the antenatal class for the eldest discussing pain relief I said I couldn't understand why a woman wouldn't have an epidural. The glares bore into me.

I had two DC one 7lb 5oz, one 8lb 13oz. Epidural both times. The second was also induced. I refused the syntocynon until the epidural was in place. Labour was 2.5 hours, no stitches, minimal pain.

One wouldn't have far less painful procedures without pain relief (colonoscopy, fracture reduction, etc). We aren't cutting off limbs at Waterloo any more with nothing but a stick to bite on and whiskey beforehand. And yet women are supposed to do it naturally. I wouldn't have a natural appendectomy or amputation.

'On his return'.. what return, I doubt with a thriving writing career (he writes for a lot of comedy shows) he has any need nor any desire to return to the NHS.

Would he say horrible things about cancer etc in his songs - yes, they did:

Look at your skin
Look at its off-white hue
Look at your eyeballs too
They've gone all yellow

You came to me
You thought you had the flu
I knew that wasn't true
You wouldn't be yellow

We took some blood off you
That's just a thing we do
To folks who turn yellow

You're yellow
Like the desert in Damascus is
You're yellow
Cause your liver has metastases

Do you know
You're really fucked, you know!
You're really fucked, you know!

And... well.. everything really. I can't think of much they didn't cover really.

I am surprised that Suman is still employed and i think if I were one of the other NHS medics with the same name as him I might be pissed off...

I am just over halfway through the tv show... im enjoying it, more the drama than the comedy. But then I spend a lot of time with medics, in hospitals with a life limiting condition, you see the bits others don't see.. and many of my friends are at the sticky splashy disgusting and deathy end of medical stuff... so im really not shocked, nor do I think anything is a particular stretch of the imagination!

I haven’t been able to watch it or read it. It’s too traumatising to me as a medical professional.

It takes me right back to being alone in the middle of the night with babies and mothers lives dependant on me and no one prepared to help and looking at me with my near nill experience to save them. It was shit for me and even more shit for them and that’s why I left.

I don’t think I would want to work with him or be treated by him, however the end point is that he realises how bad it is and leaves because he’s too traumatised to continue.

There is no support now and was even less then. You deal with the physical reality of gruesome death, the sounds, smell, feelings while extremely sleep deprived and somehow need to go home sleep for a few hours and come back the next day. There no time off after a bad outcome. You loose patients and can’t mourn. There is no one you can talk to, no therapy, no time to quietly remember those you lost. The Hours are so insane you can’t see family to decompress or even do something mundane like have a hobby. You can’t sleep unless your drunk first and you wake up seeing the eyes of those you didn’t save. Gallows humour and alcohol are the only way to cope as you realise caring deeply about each patient will break you . Or leaving.

Medicine is broken and has no idea how to fix itself. It’s worse for patients of course but until we fix the culture and the pressure of work it won’t improve for patients. Only those who are superhuman or don’t care remain in work. All those that are normal mortals and do care leave

I read the book - haven’t seen the series - and found it incredibly misogynistic. Cheap jokes at the expense of scared, vulnerable women and their injured bodies is not my idea of humour.

That said, we know there’s a major problem with misogyny in women’s healthcare, so I guess it’s probably realistic.

I haven’t RTFT so apologies if this has already been mentioned, but Kicks Count has had to put out a statement about inaccurate information in the series (as I say I haven’t seen the series but I hear it contains the old myth that baby movements reduce towards the end of a pregnancy because the baby ‘runs out of room’).

@ClaudiusTheGod

You do know he left the NHS because he felt it was impossible to provide the care he wanted to? He’s far from proud of it.

On the contrary. My impression from the book was that he didn’t get the pay and the respect that he thought he personally was entitled to. He came across as an extremely money-minded individual. I thought he should have done his research beforehand. Anyway it’ll be rolling in now, but he’d better invest it well because I don’t know how much more he can milk (excuse pun) his experiences with women at some of the most vulnerable parts of their lives.

Perhaps he should go into men’s health on his return to medicine and we can look forward to a number of ‘hilarious’ anecdotes about enlarged prostates and ripped foreskins.

In one of his other books, 'Twas the Nightshift before Christmas', there are quite a lot of anecdotes about treating men who have got things stuck inside them, and he is just as sarcastic about them, if that helps

Actually I've just watched Suman singing fairly 'irreverent' (harsh) stuff at the 2017 SMACC conference with around 2000 medical types pissing themselves ... so I guess it hasn't done him any harm at all.

I watched this and loved it. I thought all of the women came out of it looking much better than the men, Adam included. The only fathers we really saw were drunk and pissing in a corner, and making pathetic jokes. And he definitely sets up the midwives as the wise ones. As for objectifying the women having the babies, I read it as a reflection on the system being unsympathetic and possibly misogynistic- and through exposing that, although the character was an arse at times, fundamentally I thought the show was quite feminist…?!

And yet women are supposed to do it naturally. I wouldn't have a natural appendectomy or amputation

Ridiculous comparison. Childbirth is a natural process. Women have been doing it for millennia.

I felt a whiff of misogyny just from the BBC trailer. And a general contempt for patients.

@jennytogether

I watched this and loved it. I thought all of the women came out of it looking much better than the men, Adam included. The only fathers we really saw were drunk and pissing in a corner, and making pathetic jokes. And he definitely sets up the midwives as the wise ones. As for objectifying the women having the babies, I read it as a reflection on the system being unsympathetic and possibly misogynistic- and through exposing that, although the character was an arse at times, fundamentally I thought the show was quite feminist…?!

This exactly.

He comes across to me as exactly like the people (male and female) who wrote Rag Week content at Med School in the 90s.

As posters have said above, AK has acknowledged that selection for med school at the time was basically 1. Are you academic 2. Have you excelled at music or some other hobby. No thought at all as to whether you were actually going to be good at the job.

There were loads of students in my year realising the only reason they had wanted to do medicine was their parents were doctors, and now they were in, WTF were they going to do.

Female students were a minority, it was the era of the ladette so no-one was going to be pointing out misogyny anyway, and the thing to do for many was to fit in with the hard drinking culture of the boys. Or keep your head down, study and move on.

Then you started the job and were made so busy and so tired that you wondered why they had recruited you for being Grade 8 at playing the flute as you hadn't had time to even look at a fucking flute for years, have no social life and only eat sleep study and work any way.

Medicine keeps trying to change but over and over the next generation of junior doctors is still demoralized and the themes are the same.

@Blossomtoes so was death shortly thereafter four generation ago. People have been dying naturally since the beginning of time. Why help them when they are in acute pain?

yeahthat
I can see that you can't accept we have a different opinion on this. I do not think that it is good that people are so overworked and stressed out that they do have compassion fatigue. I also don't think that every time Adam Kay interacted with a woman he was nasty and uncaring. I think this interpretation lacks an understanding that these are snippets of someone's work life with a cynical humour applied. It is interesting that you don't seem able to recognise that in many of these snippets he describes some of the situations with compassion. Anyway, I think wishing that I am treated poorly by the emergency services in the future is a bit unpleasant on your part. Dare I suggest that if you dislike the series that you maybe don't watch it!

@Ionlydomassiveones

I’ve no doubt about the misogyny within the NHS - ‘cervix havers’ being a perfect example. But I don’t find Adam Kay’s book misogynistic and I think people miss the point. I can’t imagine an obstetric doctor that wouldn’t reduce each case into the actual body parts they’re dealing with. How could it not with the sheer volume of blood, guts and bodies they’re dealing with? It’s incredibly naive that under that amount of pressure, every women would have precious, individualised personal care. He describes it almost like battlefield conditions. I would’ve had no problem to have Adam Kay as my doctor - he came across as dedicated, skilled and humane.

Used to work for a Consultant Obs/Gynae with a special interest in Gynae Oncology. He terrified SHOs.. But he also tried to save every single individual woman. Not because it was a cancerous womb of ovaries that needed to be beaten, but because he didn't want any of them to die as his mother did when he was 19.

It destroyed him in the end. But not before he did save thousands of women, every one of which felt that he knew and cared for them personally - which in all likelihood, he did.

@Cbtb, I suspect that being successful as a doctor or nurse or any medical profession involves the ability to distance every patient. That surely is why doctors are not allowed to treat members of their own family? For professional sanity, it is really important not to become over-involved. Emotion has to be eliminated as much as possible. Medicine is an intellectual discipline and practice.

I also read the book, didn't know it was being made into a series and won't be watching it.

I also felt whilst reading it that he just didn't like women. Liked being seen as the saviour though.

It’s actually very acurate , misogynism in health care is alive and kicking . Explains why woman have awful experiences while in hospital . I work in healthcare btw .

Annamagaini has said it much better than me.

You have no idea at 18 what you are signing up for and then you see precious little as a student - especially a male one. The at around 23 your given a pager (yup still a pager) and told you are responsible for the lives of 200 odd sick people overnight in the hospital. You have no idea really what to do and you see so many terrible things you can’t care about them all as you want to or you would break. I did around 2 years total on obs wards and NEVER saw a normal birth - no one calls doctors to the ones there not needed and no one lets student in.

There are some amazing superhuman medical professionals who can be compassionate and not burn out but they are the minority. Ideally only these people would be doctors and nurses but I doubt there are anywhere near enough for the burden of disease we have so somehow we need to figure out a way for normal people to go through this trauma and either not end up so traumatised they quit or so burnt out they become and arsehole

I HATE his books and wouldn't watch it. I am a medic and loathe that ANYONE uses other people's suffering for 'entertainment' ... the fact we are privvy to these moments... is many things.. scary, difficult,frustrating bizarre... but funny... not really... not for them , not for us.

I don’t see the misogyny in it. If he had been an A&E doctor there would have been plenty of comic material featuring both sexes (especially certain foreign objects in certain orifices, mainly men). It’s really made me see what crushing responsibility medics have and the relentless nature of it.

Haven’t read the book so can’t comment on that.