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

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.

Review
I’d prescribe this book to anyone and everyone. It’s laugh-out-loud funny, heartbreakingly sad and gives you the lowdown on what it’s like to be holding it together while serving on the front line of our beloved but beleaguered NHS. It’s wonderful — Jonathan Ross

So clinically funny and politically important for supporters of the NHS that it should be given out on prescription, Guardian

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

You will laugh, cry and be overwhelmed with gratitude for the medical profession who work so shockingly hard to patch us up and prolong our lives, Daily Express

Finally a true picture of the harrowing, hilarious and ultimately chaotic life of the junior doctor in all its gory glory, dark comedy and unavoidable sadness. A blisteringly funny account shot through with harrowing detail, many pertinent truths and the humanity we all hope doctors conceal behind their unflappable exteriors. — Jo Brand

As hilarious as it is heartbreaking – and it IS heartbreaking (also hilarious) — Charlie Brooker

Blisteringly funny, politically enraging and often heartbreaking . . . hilarious . . . brimming not just with humour but with humanity . . . This should be a wake-up call to all who value the NHS — Hannah Beckerman, Sunday Express

A funny, excoriatingly revealing, beautiful book — Dawn French

The humour is unflinching in its darkness . . . Yet I did laugh. A lot. Kay is a skilful, muscular writer, his narrative swinging from laugh-out- loud anecdotes to tales of sheer horror. The book’s title is harrowingly apt . . . In the end, this book is a call to arms. That the NHS lost Kay is a tragedy. That this diary was written well before the Government’s battle with junior doctors is more disturbing
still’
, Independent

Hilarious and heartbreaking . . . I howled, yelped and occasionally choked with laughter . . . It’s an invigorating addition to the vogue for medical memoirs. I like to think of it sitting on a shelf next to Henry Marsh, Atul Gawande and Paul Kalanithi, turning the air bluer and bluer. It has something of all those writers, but with an added dash of a profane Adrian Mole . . . This book may hurt, but in an important and necessary way — Cathy Rentzenbrink, The Times

Unputdownable. You must read this book if you like reading, like laughing or love our NHS. It’s a spit-your-tea-out-laughing clarion call to stand up for our junior doctors with all our might — Shappi Khorsandi

What an amazing book. I laughed so hard and often I nearly choked, but it’s also very moving and important. Everyone should read it. — Cathy Rentzenbrink

By turns hilarious, shocking, heartbreaking and humbling — John Niven

Much like the NHS itself, this book is filled with hope, despair, miracles, catastrophe and acres of the sharpest gallows humour. A very funny book with a very sobering message — Chris Addison

Horrifyingly hilarious and hilariously horrifying — Danny Wallace

This is a ferociously funny book, but beneath the sheen of brilliant one-liners is a passionate, acutely personal examination of what the health service does for us, and what we’re in danger of doing to it — Mark Watson

As a hypochondriac I was worried about reading Adam Kay’s book. Luckily it’s incredibly funny – so funny, in fact, that it gave me a hernia from laughing — Joe Lycett

A scurrilously funny, poignant and fascinatingly horrific tale of being torn to pieces and spat out by the strangely loveable but graceless monster that is the NHS — Milton Jones

If we lose the NHS, Adam Kay’s diary of his him as a junior doctor will become a historical record of a unique, empathy-powered machine, and make it not just one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, but one of the saddest, too — David Whitehouse

What a hilarious, stomach-churning, thought-provoking heartbreaker of a book. I loved every single page — Jill Mansell

Superb. Unusual and funny and sad — Pam Ayres

By turns witty, gruesome, alarming, and touching. Always illuminating and searingly honest — Jonathan Dimbleby

This should be required reading for anyone who works in, uses or even voices an opinion about the NHS. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll laugh some more, you’ll think twice about ever reproducing — Dean Burnett, author of The Idiot Brain

Hilarious from the first page – very, very funny. I loved it — Kit Wharton, author of Emergency Admissions

This made me laugh out loud and cry in equal measures. Adam’s book weaves in and out of his patients’ lives and in so doing he tells, in a better narrative than I have ever seen before, of the pain and joy of working so close to despair, disease and death. It’s a quite brilliant book and will soothe the sorrows of many junior (and senior) doctors and remind us all why we entered this wonderful profession. A must read for patients too – lifting the bonnet on the working life of your jobbing hospital doctor — Prof Clare Gerada MBE, past chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners

An urgent, devastating yet truly funny account of life at the coalface of the NHS. This Is Going to Hurt had me laughing, crying and open-mouthed ― in horror and in awe ― by turn of page — Lisa Owens, author of Not Working

Hilarious, poignant, depressing and shocking. Kay is such a brilliantly talented writer he manages to be both deadly serious and hilarious at the same time. Piles of this book should be in every GP surgery waiting room and A&E department in the country. Heartbreaking, dazzling, brutally honest — Bridget Christie

Things I have done while reading this book: laughed aloud (too many times to count), read a passage to a stranger on a train (this was perhaps inadvisable but could not be helped), been consistently bowled over by the detail of Dr Kay’s sharp prose & remarkably observant journey in a job so many of us have no real understanding of. It’s an important book, a boots-on-the-ground memoir true to its title―but it’s a good hurt I was left with upon turning the last page, the kind that resonates with empathy and consequence — Ryan Gattis, author of Safe and All Involved

Stayed up half the night laughing out loud over painfully smart, honest doctor diaries — Emma Donoghue, author of Room

Funny, tragic, uplifting and brimming with bodily fluids (sorry) . . . Kay makes for a compelling bedfellow as he explores the terrifying world of the amazing men and women (just about) holding the NHS together — Francesca Brown, Stylist

A heartening, laugh-out-loud confessional on the indignities and quiet joys of being a junior doctor . . . Anchoring the wisecracks is Kay’s heartfelt respect for Britain’s junior doctors and the ignoble realities of a noble profession. At a time of anxiety over the future of the NHS, Kay’s warts-and-all account will not only bring plenty of laughs but also delivers a moving report from the NHS’s embattled frontline’, Financial Times

Hilarious . . . a complete eye-opener, Red

Laugh-out-loud funny . . . I found myself laughing in horror over and over, but Kay’s poignant final act brought me to tears. This is a valuable window into the life of a junior doctor that should be required reading for all — Sarah Shaffi, Stylist

This is a brilliant book — Russell Howard

Brilliant — Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

All of human life is contained in these diaries . . . hilarious, horrifying, Prima

At once hilarious and shocking, moving and irreverent, This Is Going to Hurt is a book that demands to be read. Adam Kay’s deft comic tone is a brilliant counterpoint to his most serious of intents: to impress upon us the importance of the NHS in our lives and the irreversible damage being inflicted upon it by indifferent governments. — Maggie O’Farrell

Brutally funny . . . jaw-dropping, New Statesman

Kay intersperses horror stories from the NHS front line with blissfully brilliant wordplay, Daily Mail

Uniquely funny and unexpectedly heartbreaking — Adam Hills

About the Author

Adam Kay is an award-winning comedian and author of the million-copy bestseller This is Going to Hurt. He previously worked as a junior doctor, which is hopefully clear by now. He lives in London.