When I sat down to watch This is Going to Hurt this weekend, I was prepared for it to be difficult viewing.
I’d enjoyed the book – relating to Adam Kay’s funny anecdotes involving patients and colleagues, as well as empathising with the strain he was under as an NHS doctor.
I was not disappointed to discover that the television adaptation maintained its unadulterated and raw storytelling.
We watch Ben Whishaw flawlessly embody Adam, as he guides us through the good, the bad, and occasionally ugly moments he encounters working as a junior doctor.
I’ve been a doctor since 2016 and now work between intensive care and theatre.
As someone working in the world of medicine, I found this series to be a welcome departure from the nauseating, overly-glamourised medical dramas I’ve avoided watching, because of how truly it represents our experiences.
We meet Adam just as he is promoted to ‘acting registrar’ – a position held by a doctor undertaking advanced training in a specialist field. Suddenly he finds himself with a mountain of responsibility in one of the most stressful parts of the hospital – the labour ward.
Working alongside Adam is the enthusiastic but inexperienced Shruti Acharya (played brilliantly by Ambika Mod) and they build a working friendship despite his brutal sarcasm and countless jibes about her knowledge and skills.
It’s tough watching the inevitability of it all – she begins her journey incredibly enthusiastically, but the way she’s treated by patients, colleagues and in particular the system, turns her passion into a flickering flame hopelessly burning out.
The bitter truth of it is, every NHS hospital probably has many doctors and nurses who feel just like Shruti. It’s something we’ve all experienced at some stage, but it’s probably more common now since the pandemic changed our working lives.
We later see her opening up to a consultant she looks up to. She confides in her that she feels overwhelmed, that she feels like a fraud and asks where the support is for the traumatic things she’s seen at work.
Her consultant callously replies ‘are you sure you’re in the right job?’. There is an inherited mentality that part of being a good doctor means you have to be categorically resilient regardless of what you go through.