This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor

A hilarious book, although sad in parts, the reality is it shows how mistreated the doctors (and I am sure other staff) of the (British) HNS are. Seriously overworked to the point of dangerous, it is a miracle any of them come out of their career with a spouse or friends, the way they are relentlessly overworked and underpaid.

To hammer home the lack of empathy they get from the government and the majority of the general public too, it is worth reading this book. However it comes into its own with the hilarious and brilliantly delivered anecdotes from his time on the wards, as recorded in his diary entries, the best of which Adam Kay shares with us.

I just copy and pasted a whole bunch that had me inappropriately laughing out loud when I read this over a few lunchtimes at work.

5 stars

“I notice that every patient on the ward has a pulse of 60 recorded in their observation chart so I surreptitiously inspect the healthcare assistant's measurement technique. He feels the patient's pulse, looks at his watch and meticulously counts the number of seconds per minute.” -“Tuesday, 5 July 2005 Trying to work out a seventy-year-old lady's alcohol consumption to record in the notes. I've established that wine is her poison. Me: ‘And how much wine do you drink per day, would you say?' Patient: ‘About three bottles on a good day.' Me: ‘OK . . . And on a bad day?' Patient: ‘On a bad day I only manage one.” -“Woman storms out of gynae outpatients screaming at the clinic sister, ‘I pay your salary! I pay your salary!' The sister yells back, ‘Can I have a raise then?” -“Three a.m. attendance at labour ward triage. Patient RO is twenty five years old and thirty weeks into her first pregnancy. She complains of a large number of painless spots on her tongue. Diagnosis: taste buds.”-“... and mild vaginal burns from a patient stuffing a string of lights inside and turning them on (bringing new meaning to the phrase ‘I put the Christmas lights up myself').” -“Her extremely posh eight year-old asks her a question about the economy (!), and before she answers it, she asks her extremely posh five year-old “Do you know what the economy is, darling?”“Yes mummy, it's the part of the plane that's terrible”.This is how revolutions start.”