Book Review - This is going to hurt - Adam Kay

This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor by Adam Kay
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Welcome to the life of a junior doctor: 97-hour weeks, life and death decisions, a constant tsunami of bodily fluids, and the hospital parking meter earns more than you.

Scribbled in secret after endless days, sleepless nights and missed weekends, Adam Kay's This is Going to Hurt provides a no-holds-barred account of his time on the NHS front line. Hilarious, horrifying and heartbreaking, this diary is everything you wanted to know - and more than a few things you didn't - about life on and off the hospital ward.

There are definitely some funny moments in this book that I found myself laughing at but it is also a sad reflection of how undervalued NHS staff were at the time it was written and unfortunately still are. It's no spoiler (given that the blurb on the book states the author, Adam Kay, is now a comedian and writer for TV) that there wasn't going to be a happy ending.

My main criticism of the book though is the use of footnotes. Everytime a medical term needs to be explained or further information given about an entry it's done as a footnote. These are marked with a tiny asterisk in the main text that are often hard to spot. For me this totally interrupted the flow of the book. I'd find myself reading an entry (the book is a series of diary entries) then looking at the footnotes, tracking them back to the main text. The layout of these footnotes wasn't always great either - they would be continued on the next page due to spacing issues. You'd be forgiven for thinking I'm picky but of the 263 page issue I read, 128 pages had footnotes. I only finished the book on my second attempt. I think I gave up the first time due to the lack of flow.

It's still worth a read though. But not if you're squeamish or don't wish to know the sort of things that doctors have to extract from all bodily orifices!

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