This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor Paperback – September 7, 2017

This was a difficult book to read because it's a collection of the author's thoughts about the end of her life, when she was diagnosed at age 37 with stage 4 (metastatic) colon cancer. She was a loving mother to two very young girls, wife to her husband, daughter to her parents, and sister to her older siblings. It was a devastating diagnosis and a heartbreaking journey that she took for the next almost five years, until she sadly died painful death characteristic of many stage 4 cancers. Her intent was to have this chronicle of her death published posthumously as almost a love letter to her family. What a gift for them!I found her thoughts were raw and honest and the book was very well-written. I only wish we learned more about her life and culture as a nearly blind Chinese refuge who escaped on an over-crowded fishing boat to Hong Kong from Vietnam -- all before she emigrated to the United State at age four.What I don't understand are the many harsh reviews. How can people criticize her painful journey towards her premature death and the treatment and other decisions she made along the way? How can reviewers tell her which spiritual or religious paths she should have taken? How can people be jealous of the fact that she studied very hard and graduated from an elite college and law school and that she and her husband made a generous living by working hard, long hours? Or that she didn't have to work while she was undergoing chemotherapy because her husband was earning a living? Why does this book necessarily have to be compared to Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air memoir, a book I also read and admire? Can't Kalanithi's and Yip-Williams's memoirs stand on their own for their own merits and the life stories they told? Why are reviewers faulting the book because it's sad and depressing at times? How could a book about a young woman and mother in her prime of life dying from cancer NOT be sad or depressing?I just don't understand the harsh reviews. However, I recommend the book if you want to hear about how one person dealt with a devastating and painful cancer diagnosis.

‘This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries if a Junior Doctor” by Adam Kay is a tough but important read. The author starts off “After 6 years of training and a further 6 years on the wards, I resigned my job as a junior doctor. My parents still haven’t forgiven me" and finishes with “Why should anyone train to be a doctor anymore?” In between he recounts story after story of life as a medical student and trainee in obstetrics and gynecology in the UK around 2010. Between f-bombs, several stories about objects in body cavities and scrubs soaked in bodily fluids, the author weaves in his reflections on the medical profession now and where it’s going. The first 30ish pages are not engaging and I couldn’t identify with the author’s perspective but stick with the book because it comes through slowly in little hints. I finished the book thinking through the choices I’ve personally made and how tough it must have been for someone to walk away from the field he’s trained in for so long. It’s painful to be on the other side of medical training, very happy with my current career, colleagues, and choices, but remember just how hard it was to get here. The author pleas for hospitals and administration to care for the emotional wellness of physicians and all medical providers. Doctors are supposed to be superheroes and get to work no matter what but we are human too. We all need to ‘Chip away at the ingrained notion that doctors and nurses don’t need to, or shouldn’t, talk about (bad outcomes, mistakes, abuse from patients, insert more here) because that same ingrained notion is partly responsible for the huge rise in people leaving the profession, the rise in stress-related absence, illness, and…suicide. We all need someone to talk to..Care for the Carer." Excellent read. @drlorashahine

A lot of humor amidst personal struggle to maintain oneself and keep going. I'm a retired ER nurse. I enjoyed the humor re the human condition, but not that it was primarily OB/GYN--just too narrowly focused for me. I have no idea how a non-medical person would receive this book, but it has great reviews from the same.My general impression: Lots of humor. Lots of personal stress of the author--very justified stress from loss of all kinds. And then a sudden, heart-wrenching conclusion. The author warns us at the beginning that he left the field. Still, after so much humor, the conclusion was jarring. Perhaps because there was no forewarning--no thoughts of leaving prior to it happening. And, after all the humor, the sudden ending of disaster leaves the reader searching for an overall emotion to ascribe to the read. The ending makes the book something 360 degrees different than what I thought I was spending hours reading. It's a good book, I'm just not sure whom I'd recommend it to.

Being American, my knowledge of NHS is slim, with the exception of the information I get from reading the large amount of UK lit I read.However, Adam paints a picture of slapstick and moving me to tears. As a citizen of the planet, I'm outraged by some of the corners he has to cut over the course of his years as a doctor to make sure things are funded by the NHS, but at the same point, I think of the broken system here in America where millions have no health insurance, and I think, is that better? Just because I HAVE secure health insurance, doesn't mean that even my neighbor does. (Which I know for a fact, they don't)Although, politically, there was definitely outrage, and I was very much changed by this book by the low points, Adam's high points and his hilarity had me in stiches at many points, the overall point of this book was not lost on me.And the next time I go to the ER, I will be nicer to that doctor that seems like he has a bug in his butt. Who knows what happened with his last patient?

If you think American medicine is lacking check out this read! Humorous indeed, but concerning as well.

Como também médica recém-formada, muitas frases lidas até a então metade do livro parecem tiradas da minha cabeça – risada garantida. Está sendo uma leitura muito prazerosa, ainda mais por ter perdido o costume de leitura não-acadêmica após tantos anos entre pré-vestibular e faculdade.

I have read this book twice, the first time in 2018 when it first came out, and then, having forgotten I had read it, I read it again last week. It’s still struck me as empathetic, funny in parts and a very good read.

Read this after watching the TV version. As is often the case, the book is even better! The book is filled with brutal honesty about life as a junior doctor - the despair and joys of their day to day working life. Often horrifying, shocking and disturbing, but written with such wit and large doses of gallows humour, making even the most difficult stories palatable. Couldn’t put it down! A must read.

Amazing light hearted comedy

The blurb and publicity praise the book as an adorably funny satire on the hospital business. Yes, it is funny, it is set in Great Britain, mainly in gynaecology and in the British NHS healthcare system, but it is not (actually) satire. It is an exact description of a doctor's work and, apart from a few deviations (our specialist training does not follow exactly the same pattern), it can be transferred exactly to Germany, to everything that goes wrong, to everything that is a daily burden for all employees in the healthcare system. Even many of the situations that seem very strange or even absurd to outsiders have probably been experienced in the same or a similar way by almost everyone who has worked in a hospital for a few years. I am sure that they happened in exactly the same way and were not invented by the author. In particular - and this is where the book ends - it is an indictment of the complete disregard shown by politicians for the people who work in hospitals or elsewhere on a daily basis. But in the end it doesn't matter. Even our current Minister of Health, Mr Lauterbach, would probably not change anything if he were to devote his precious time to this book at all, and would probably not even feel addressed. In this respect: absolutely worth reading, but also very depressing. Not funny.