Adam Kay Quotes

• “Her extremely posh eight year-old asks her a question about the economy (!), and before she answers it, she asks her extremely posh five year-old "Do you know what the economy is, darling?"
  
  "Yes mummy, it's the part of the plane that's terrible".
  
  This is how revolutions start.”

  Adam Kay

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• “So I told them the truth: the hours are terrible, the pay is terrible, the conditions are terrible; you’re underappreciated, unsupported, disrespected and frequently physically endangered. But there’s no better job in the world.”

  Adam Kay

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• “a great doctor must have a huge heart and a distended aorta through which pumps a vast lake of compassion and human kindness.”

  Adam Kay

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• “the depth of the lows is the price you pay for the height of the highs.”

  Adam Kay

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• “I notice that every patient on the ward has a pulse of 60 recorded in their observation chart so I surreptitiously inspect the healthcare assistant’s measurement technique. He feels the patient’s pulse, looks at his watch and meticulously counts the number of seconds per minute.”

  Adam Kay

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• “You don’t cure depression, the same way you don’t cure asthma; you manage it. I’m the inhaler he’s decided to go with and I should be pleased he’s gone this long without an attack.”

  Adam Kay

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• “Tuesday, 5 July 2005 Trying to work out a seventy-year-old lady’s alcohol consumption to record in the notes. I’ve established that wine is her poison. Me: ‘And how much wine do you drink per day, would you say?’ Patient: ‘About three bottles on a good day.’ Me: ‘OK . . . And on a bad day?’ Patient: ‘On a bad day I only manage one.”

  Adam Kay

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• “From the most insignificant of actions can come the most serious of consequences.”

  Adam Kay

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• “Tuesday, 9th Novermber 2004
  Bleeped awake at 3AM from my first half hour shut-eye in three shifts to prescribe a sleeping pill to a patient whose sleep is evidently much more important than mine. My powers are greater than I realised; I arrive on the ward to find the patient is asleep.”

  Adam Kay

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• “Electrolytes are the salts in the blood – mostly sodium, potassium, chloride and calcium. If levels become too high or too low, your body has a way of alerting you, by making your heart stop or putting you in a coma. It’s clever like that.”

  Adam Kay

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• “Full marks to the anaesthetist wearing a badge that says; 'He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake'.”

  Adam Kay

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• “This morning I delivered little baby Sayton – pronounced Satan, as in King of the Underworld.”

  Adam Kay

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• “But it’s a Saturday night and the NHS runs a skeleton service. Actually, that’s unfair on skeletons – it’s more like when they dig up remains of Neolithic Man and reconstruct what he might have looked like from a piece of clavicle and a thumb joint.”

  Adam Kay

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• “It’s funny – you don’t think of doctors getting ill.’ It’s true, and I think it’s part of something bigger: patients don’t actually think of doctors as being human. It’s why they’re so quick to complain if we make a mistake or if we get cross. It’s why they’ll bite our heads off when we finally call them into our over-running clinic room at 7 p.m., not thinking that we also have homes we’d rather be at. But it’s the flip side of not wanting your doctor to be fallible, capable of getting your diagnosis wrong. They don’t want to think of medicine as a subject that anyone on the planet can learn, a career choice their mouth-breathing cousin could have made.”

  Adam Kay

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• “Would you believe there’s a medical term specifically and exclusively for a mass of undigested sharon fruit in an intestine? No wonder medical school takes so long, learning all this shit.”

  Adam Kay

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• “I’ve not sat down for twelve hours, let alone rested my eyes, my dinner’s sitting uneaten in my locker and I’ve just called a midwife ‘Mum’ by accident.”

  Adam Kay

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• “I’m as big a fan of recycling as the next man, but if you turn a used condom inside out and put it back on for round two, it’s probably not going to be that effective.”

  Adam Kay

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• “Called to the Early Pregnancy Unit by one of the SHOs to confirm a miscarriage at eight weeks – he’s new to scanning and wants a second pair of eyes. I remember that feeling only too well and scamper over. He’s managed the couple’s expectations very well, and clearly made them aware it doesn’t look good – they’re sad and silent as I walk in. What he hasn’t done very well is the ultrasound. He may as well have been scanning the back of his hand or a packet of Quavers. Not only is the baby fine, but so is the other baby that he hadn’t spotted.”

  Adam Kay

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• “But unfortunately the depth of the lows is the price you pay for the height of the highs.”

  Adam Kay

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• “They must have something that cannot be memorized and graded: a great doctor must have a huge heart and a distended aorta through which pumps a vast lake of compassion and human kindness.”

  Adam Kay

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• “Crash call to a labour ward room. The husband was dicking around on a birthing ball and fell off, cracking his skull on the ground.”

  Adam Kay

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• “Look at the Wikipedia entry for any famous doctor, and you’ll see: ‘He proved himself an accomplished rugby player in youth leagues. He excelled as a distance runner and in his final year at school was vice-captain of the athletics team.’ This particular description is of a certain Dr H. Shipman, so perhaps it’s not a rock-solid system.”

  Adam Kay

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• “Apricot stones contain cyanide,’ he replies drily. ‘The death cap mushroom has a fifty per cent fatality rate. Natural does not equal safe. There’s a plant in my garden where if you simply sat under it for ten minutes then you’d be dead.’ Job done: she bins the tablets. I ask him about that”

  Adam Kay

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• “For me, the true miracle of childbirth is that smart, rational people with jobs and the ability to vote look at these half-melted fleshy blobs, their heads misshapen from being squeezed through a pelvis, covered in five types of horrendous gunk, looking like they’ve spent a good two hours rolling around on top of a deep-pan pizza, and honestly believe they look beautiful.”

  Adam Kay

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• “woman storms out of gynae outpatients screaming at the clinic sister, ‘I pay your salary! I pay your salary!’ The sister yells back, ‘Can I have a raise then?”

  Adam Kay

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