In the new book, he writes: “Elton John was wrong about sorry being the hardest word – for me, it was ‘hello’. I knew in advance that Adam Kay might seem shy. On the strength of talking to him, I’d say it still does. Photograph: Anika Molnar/BBC/Sister/AMCĬomedy is Kay’s forte but, as the first memoir related, he hung up his stethoscope after a tragic event: one of his patients lost her baby because of an unforeseen complication with her pregnancy and had to go into ICU for an emergency hysterectomy – and while it was not his fault, he felt it to be his responsibility and the catastrophic nature of it affected him profoundly.
He also reveals a serious eating disorder with which he struggled when younger.īen Whishaw as Adam, with Ambika Mod as Shruti in the BBC drama This Is Going to Hurt. As well as writing about his marriage to a woman (not named) and his husband, James Kay (formerly Farrell), he gives a terrifying account of being raped while on a trip to a medical conference in New Zealand. In Undoctored, the pendulum swings the other way: it is decisively personal. He wrote about the tragicomedy of his professional life, the insanity of 97-hour working weeks and the derisory wages while, in a deeper sense, he gave himself the slip. This is Going to Hurt was gender neutral, did not even make it clear he was gay (it was the television series that took that step). If you thought This is Going to Hurt was revealing, the new book makes the first seem discreet bordering on secretive. We meet on a sunny morning in Oxfordshire, near to where he lives, to talk about his extraordinary new memoir, Undoctored: The Story of a Medic who Ran Out of Patients – super-readable, funny and disturbing. Most recently, it has been made into a major BBC series starring Ben Whishaw and Adam Kay has become the go-to medic of the day, the doctor in the house and on stage and screen. Wasn’t the market for medical memoirs already saturated? But This is Going to Hurt possessed what the others lacked: as well as being serious, it was indomitably entertaining and went on to sell more than two-and-a-half million copies, was translated into 37 languages and became a literary sensation. A diary about life as a junior doctor working on an obstetrics ward seemed an unlikely publishing bet. W hen Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt was published in 2017 there were several acclaimed books by surgeons doing the rounds – Henry Marsh’s Do No Harm, Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi.
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