Welcome back to my Sunday Book Review. This book wasn’t exactly on my reading list, but my bestie was in town last month visiting from the UK and gave me the book before she left. After sharing some of the tidbits of the book with me I felt compelled to start reading it and pushed it up to the front of my big fat TBR list. I’m glad I did.

 

 

Blurb:

 

‘Painfully funny. The pain and the funniness somehow add up to something entirely good, entirely noble and entirely loveable.’ – Stephen Fry

The Sunday Times Number One Bestseller and Humour Book of the Year
Winner of the Books Are My Bag Book of the Year
Winner of iBooks’ Book of the Year

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.

As seen on ITV’s Zoe Ball Book Club

This edition includes extra diary entries and a new afterword by the author.

 

My 5 Star Review

 

Funny, Sad, Enlightening

Dr. Adam Kay takes through his years of becoming a doctor working in a British NHS hospital. Most of the book is written as diary entries where the clever doc shares some of his more unusual situations he’s had to deal with earlier as an intern as well as once he became a full-fledged ob/gyn doctor.

It was truly amazing to learn just how many people enjoy shoving foreign (and not so foreign) objects into whatever orifices strikes their fancies. But besides the oohs and awes and laughter, the realism shines through from Kay about not only the NHS and its financial shortcomings, and the often long and under-appreciated hours the doctors and nurses put in on their long days, which often run into two and three day shifts with no sleep. This book evokes the actual emotional turmoil a doctor experiences on a daily basis. Doctors are only human like the rest of us. They may not wear their hearts on their sleeves, but most carry with them the sad and painful things they see daily.

How much can one doctor take? A doctor who has studied and interned for years and saved many lives shares his accounting here of both, his most triumphant moments as well as his hardships and sacrifices he’s made along the way to becoming a doctor. This book really brings to light how patients come first above everything else, and how doctors sacrifice personal relationships in the name of emergencies. Read this book and find out for yourself.

A most informative look and touching account of one doctor’s saves, misses, and an enormous decision weighing on Dr. Kay to give it all up.