This is Going to Hurt
Adam Kay, 2017
Memoir & biography Popular science
A junior doctor’s diary of NHS night shifts, absurd patients and impossible hours—funny, furious and clear-eyed about what the job does to the people who do it.
Feels like melancholy. About memory.
A page from the book
Why we need doctors to be superhuman, and what that costs them.
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. It’s why they’re so quick to complain if we make a mistake or if we get cross. It’s why they’ll bite our heads off when we finally call them into our over-running clinic room at 7 p.m., not thinking that we also have homes we’d rather be at. But it’s the flip side of not wanting your doctor to be fallible, capable of getting your diagnosis wrong. They don’t want to think of medicine as a subject that anyone on the planet can learn, a career choice their mouth-breathing cousin could have made. Adam Kay.Adam Kay worked for six years as an NHS doctor, mostly in obstetrics and gynaecology, before leaving medicine to write comedy; the diaries he kept on the wards became this book.
Books that feel like this
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Trevor Noah, 2016
A comedian's account of growing up mixed-race and illegal under apartheid, where survival depended on church, hustle, and a mother who refused to be afraid.
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Questions readers ask
- What is This is Going to Hurt like?
- Feels like melancholy. About memory.
- What should I read after This is Going to Hurt?
- If you liked This is Going to Hurt, try Shoe Dog (Phil Knight), The Year of Magical Thinking (Joan Didion) and The Education of Henry Adams (Henry Adams).
A taste of the feed
The difference between a job that empties you and a calling that spends you.
I’d tell men and women in their midtwenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don’t know what that means, seek it. If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt.
Shoe Dog · Phil Knight
What trauma does to a mind that finally stops moving.
Trauma waits for stillness. Lydia feels like a cracked egg, and she doesn’t know if she’s the shell or the yolk or the white. She is scrambled.
American Dirt · Jeanine Cummins
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