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This Is Going to Hurt

The Bestselling Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor

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This Is Going to Hurt

By: Adam Kay
Narrated by: Adam Kay
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About this listen

Read by the author, Adam Kay.

The multi-million copy bestseller
Book of the Year at The National Book Awards

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

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.

Sunday Times Number One Bestseller for over eight months and winner of a record FOUR National Book Awards: Book of the Year, Non-Fiction Book of the Year, New Writer of the Year and Zoe Ball Book Club Book of the Year.

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

 Education & Training Medical Medicine & Health Care Industry Professionals & Academics Funny Witty Inspiring Thought-Provoking Heartfelt Comedy Feel-Good Health Care

Critic reviews

Painfully funny. The pain and the funniness somehow add up to something entirely good, entirely noble and entirely loveable. (Stephen Fry)
I'm not a Doctor (despite what I sometimes say) but 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)
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)
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)
All stars
Most relevant
Birth, death, and all the dirty stuff in between, Adam has written a fascinating account of being a Junior Doctor and beyond. In addition he tells his tales with the smoothness of a stage performer.
What's more, I'm a vet, and it's nice to know other medical professions get the same problems as we have. But nationalised, and with the health of the country on their shoulders.
Gods bless this NHS

Well written, Well told

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The best book I have ever had the pleasure of listening to. Adam Kay made me both howl with laughter and cry with sorrow. His writing is eloquent and his reading of the book is brilliant. I highly recommend it to everyone, Fellow NHS staff will empathise with him and his struggles. Non NHS staff should listen to it for an insight into a truly unique world.

Brilliant!

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Probably not a good read if you are in the midst of pregnancy. But overall great anecdotes, not too ranty when it comes to the challenges of the NHS, incredibly funny in places and make you remember there’s nought so queer as folk.

A wonderful raconteur.

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As a nurse of 49 years..... much of this spent in the community where we have a policy that district nurses just have to see however many patients the hospital or GPs send to them with no ceiling on numbers and no consideration of safety or sanity, I can completely identify with much of what he talks about. It is so sad these days, to see how the NHS is being devalued and destroyed by a poor management system and a wish to privatise and make money from people's ill health. when it's gone it's gone. There will always be some bad apples but the vast majority of doctors and nurses go above and beyond day in day out.

Loved this, gives a wonderful insight into the job

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This performance expertly delivers the humour and sarcasm of the writer who has gone to great lengths to make you feel like you are indeed there reading his diary as he talks about the horrors of the Modern NHS

As an allied health professional I understood all of the things this brave and bold former doctor has written and hope that the wider public read / listen to his honest and open account of front line working in the NHS

It has to be said that we should never have lost some one with such skill, compassion and understanding from the Health Service

Funny,Engaging & Eye Opening

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