Adam Kay's This is Going to Hurt

[musicalfrog]

I haven't even finished the book yet but I'm getting more and more annoyed with him the further in I go. I didn't mind him initially but then the more he progresses in his career the more insufferable he gets!

Is he really such an arrogant *** or is he just writing for laughs? Whichever, I'm glad he's not a practicing doctor now, but unfortunately I recognise his attitude in a couple of doctors I had the misfortune to encounter during my first birth experience.

Just wondering if anyone else had the same reaction as me? I've not seen him on TV or anything, the book is all I have to go on.

Oh, and Mumsnet gets a mention a few chapters in!

@choosername1234

I think it must be a work of (partial) fiction. I've worked in A&E for almost 20 years and have only a small handful of "stories", certainly not enough to fill a book.

I think it’s acknowledged that it’s not entirely non-fiction. It’s been pointed out that some of the diary entries are actually really old jokes and anecdotes that have been around for years.

So I think some of the stories do need to be taken with a pinch of salt and awareness they’ve been written for a book to be ‘funny’ and entertaining.

One of the extracts that annoyed me was the one with a woman who was suffering with pelvic pain and felt she wasn’t being listened to. There’s a long history of women not being listened to or taken seriously by drs and needlessly suffering, particularly with gynaecological issues. So I found it interesting that he didn’t touch upon this but rather showed a complete stereotype of the ‘hysterical woman’ who had (in his opinion) nothing wrong with her and threw a bin at him whilst shouting ‘I know my own body!’ (A phrase often used when you hear real-life women who have genuinely let down by drs). I thought it was interesting how he took the scenario and neatly switched it around to make the male doctor the victim.

MissyB1, he performed in a comedy duo, playing keyboard and singing. Their idea of humour included a version of the song “Yellow”, about a patient jaundiced with terminal cancer. It included lines such as “You’re yellow, like the desert round Damascus is
You’re yellow ‘cause your liver has metastases..”
I think they originally performed to fellow doctors, but then took their act to mainstream venues including the Edinburgh Fringe. The song mocking Downs babies was a low even for them - “your baby’s a bit of a Mong” being part of the vile lyrics.
As a doctor myself I can tolerate a fair bit of black humour, but Kay was just way out of line. A shame, because some of their other songs were genuinely hilarious.

I looked for the lyrics and got as far as The Black and White Menstrual Show 🤦‍♀️

www.metrolyrics.com/adam-kay-suman-biswas-lyrics.html

If anyone is still doubting whether he has crossed the line, can I suggest you look at these lyrics to some of his other songs too. "Menstrual rag" and "northern birds" being 2 of the first I looked at that showcase the hatred loud and clear.

Gosh I hate him even more now than I did when I read the book.

God what a repulsive man.

Wow, he really does hate women.

I enjoyed the book as I found some parts really funny. I thought the author’s tendency to end an anecdote with something rude or flippant was just an attempt to keep it (mostly) lighthearted.

And he did seem to care about many of his patients, working countless hours of unpaid overtime. I felt very angry on his behalf that he had to sacrifice his relationship, major family events and a holiday of a lifetime to his job.

I thought that a few parts reflected badly on him though, the dolphin tattoo incident and his dislike of the uro-gyno (sp?) clinic and using phrases such as “greyer than your nan’s vagina”.

I’m shocked by those song lyrics, there’s no defending those. Awful.

Cattenberg, we all worked horrendous hours of overtime and had almost no life outside the hospital - my generation of doctors had it even worse than Kay’s lot. But it didn’t turn us all into misogynistic arrogant shits, or excuse those few who were.

Horrible book written by a grade A arsehole.

Babdoc, I’m not excusing him, but I was shocked by how badly junior doctors were treated by the NHS, and how little support there was for them after a traumatic event.

I’m still amazed that he admitted to this:

www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/10/adam-kay-this-is-going-to-hurt-interview-junior-doctor

On another occasion he deals with a difficult and racist patient undergoing surgery by sewing her up after the operation in such a way as to disfigure her dolphin tattoo. Did that really happen?

“I don’t want to talk about that one because that’s one I wasn’t meant to put in the book,” he says, adding, “but that obviously did happen.”

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

@knightinshiningwhatever

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

How do his comments (which were written in retrospect when presumably he had time set aside to write his book) help him deal with his workload? He had also quite medicine when he wrote it.

@knightinshiningwhatever

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 think you need to get out of acute medicine then. If your massive workload is making you misogynistic you need to take professional responsibility and check whether you’re competent.

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

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 think he’s both.

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

@knightinshiningwhatever

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

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.

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

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.