Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


A love letter to the NHS

This is going to hurt by Adam Kay

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The NHS being a demanding mistress, that is.  Adam Kay is a screenwriter for various UK TV shows, but before he switched careers he was a doctor specialising in gynaecology and obstetrics. During his studies, he was advised to keep a diary. Years after switching careers, he received a letter from the Medical Board of Whatever stating that they’d struck him from the professional register as he hadn’t practised medicine in years. It led him to revisit his diaries, now presented here in book form.  […]

I should have probably read this at Christmas

Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas by Adam Kay

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The obligatory Christmas tie-in to Kay’s This Is Going To Hurt, Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas covers the many Christmases that Kay worked for the NHS, with all the humour and heartache that one would expect. It’s an extremely quick read too – you could finish it in the time it took you to eat a Christmas dinner – which would fit perfectly into a stocking (remember this for, erm, nine months time I guess). Being an obstetrics/maternity specialist, babies who refuse to wait till […]

Checks All the Boxes and Does It Well

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Best for: Anyone who likes fairly humorous personal memoirs, especially of the healthcare variety. Probably not best for those currently pregnant, unless they want to read a bunch of vignettes about the various things that might go wrong during labor and delivery (though to be fair, only one such vignette ends poorly, and that’s near the end of the book). In a nutshell: Former junior doctor Adam Kay unearthed his diaries from the few years he was a doctor working in the NHS. Worth quoting: […]



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