Every health professional with a few years of clinical experience under his/her belt will have suffered through long, restless, sleepless nights, where you agonise over every decision taken by you while treating a patient. Is there anything I could have done better? Was my clinical decision-making suspect?
Well, you better be forewarned as reading this book is likely to take you down a similar rabbit hole!
The writer, Adam Kay, a former doctor gives you a sneak peek into the personal diary he maintained during his years as a junior doctor in the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom (UK). Unlike a conventional memoir though, the book has sporadic diary entries describing crisp patient focused anecdotes with each episode unrelated to the other. The initial half describes incidents related to the writer’s general medical practice in hospital settings; while the latter half is dedicated to the time, he spent specialising in obstetrics.
Every anecdote in the book has a different tone and emotion, mirroring the mayhem commonly seen in a doctor’s personal and professional life. All the milestone firsts in a doctor career are covered through anecdotes; the first death witnessed, the first solo surgery and of course, the first save. Along with medical successes and failures, the book also describes comical episodes occurring on the hospital premises like patients bribing doctors with money for an early release. The irreverent tone of the author ensures that you maintain a wide smile on your face throughout the book.
But if you read between the lines, you’ll that the underlying message of the book is to highlight the long hours of work, lack of social life and the extreme stress that the writer was forced to face. And finally, occasions in which despite his best efforts, he failed his patients.
Conversations regarding treatment failures and the ensuing guilt experienced by those involved, is an issue which most of the medical community refers to hide under the carpet. But for the first time, this book brings it out right in the open!
As a community, we have normalised suppressing our feelings around professional failures and believe that the only way to deal with it is to go on as normal. This book reminds us that it is an unreasonable and inhuman expectation from ourselves and may take us to a breaking point, if ignored.
If this book inspires every hospital administrator, nurse or practitioner to seek the much needed mental support for himself and his colleagues in stressful times, I think the book would have hit its mark!
