What do you think?
Rate this book
274 pages, Hardcover
First published September 15, 2022
Colleagues and friends have been anonymised in this book by replacing their names with members of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, an organisation which I'm pretty sure has no lawyers. Anonymising my family would have been harder, so I haven't bothered.I didn't like the book to begin with, if felt like the author was trying too hard with at least one jokey sentence per paragraph. Either I got used to it and it ceased to annoy, or he stopped doing it. It's not the sort of book I want to reread, so I'm not going back to check.
I didn’t envy the doctors either. Having to bring cost into the equation when advising patients just doesn’t feel … proper, and I’m enormously thankful I never had to do it during my medical career. Whatever the NHS’s failings, there’s no fairer way to decide who to treat than ‘everyone’ and no better way to treat them all than ‘equally’. Meanwhile, in the US, healthcare is not a human right but a commodity to be haggled over with insurance companies..And as he says
The availability and affordability of healthcare remains Americans’ number one concern in poll after poll, with two thirds of US bankruptcies having healthcare bills as a contributory factor. Less than half of Americans can afford an unexpected medical bill of a thousand dollars, which, if my experience in Florida is anything to go by, probably wouldn’t cover much more than a couple of Nurofen and a Band-Aid.Later, the cat he shares with his ex-wife gets really sick and they are told £6,000 for the operation that will cure him. Since Kay has been paying out on health insurance for cat, he's pretty sure that a call to the insurance company will only be a formality. Of course it isn't, there is small print. Claim denied. But they will pay out to have the little kitty, just three years old, put to sleep. And they have no money, so they have no choice. Heart-breaking.
When secondary school came around, I became a wide-eyed, wide-beaked gosling, force-fed the corn that would eventually lead to its starring role in a foie gras starter. My evenings, weekends and holidays were stuffed with exam revision, interview practice, work experience and med-school-mandated extra-curricular activities. There definitely wasn't any time for spare socialising. [...] Sometimes, the loneliest feelings of all don't come from total isolation but from being on the edge of the cword, watching the rest of the world live its life, as if it's happening on television and not three feet away from you in the canteen. But I told myself that maybe this was just what adulthood was like sometimes.
I couldn't deny that doors had been opened for me but I'd definitely put in the work once I'd walked through them. The ceaseless studying, the endless after-school classes, the timetable of extra-curricular activities that would give any Olympic athlete a nervo.
Mental illness in patients is treated (after a fashion) but when it occurs within medicine's own ranks, there's still a distinctly Victorian attitude--it's seen as either a failing or self-inflicted. You could argue--and I'm sure people would have--that I was the person sticking my finger down my throat, so all I had to do was...not?
I couldn't think of any other person I could confide in. Who could I trust to under-react, to hide their shock, or be sympathetic and non-judgemental?
This poor child is already fucked and it doesn't even exist. [...] Plus the world is hurtling hellward in almost every respect, so you're subjecting your child, who you love more than anyone else in the universe and wish a life better than yours, to a future where the only certainty is that it's going to be much, much worse.