Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Writer and former junior doctor best known for the bestselling memoir 'This Is Going to Hurt' about his medical experiences, adapted into a BAFTA-winning TV ser
On the island
Eight records
I was forced to play the piano. If you want to be a doctor, you have to have all these things... I discovered Liberace... I loved the idea that you could be sort of virtuoso and it wasn't just serious stuff.
Jarvis's lyrics. He's the poet laureate of Outsiders... it really, really spoke to me. It was the sound of my GCSEs.
I relearnt the piano over lockdown, and this was a piece I played for my music scholarship to school... I found the same book that I had of my Chopin waltzes and I turned to it and I couldn't play it. And it's so depressing to be worse at something now than when you're a teenager.
Sit Down, You're Rockin' the Boat
Stubby Kaye and the Original Broadway Cast
Sit down, your rock in the boat could in a way be medicine's slogan. You're not meant to put your head up too high. I was once told that the way to succeed in medicine is to be quiet and mediocre.
Coming back from these shifts... you're exhausted and you're covered in blood. And this was one of the songs on the Keeping Me Awake playlist. Put the window down, put this up loud and sing along with every single word to stay awake long enough to still be alive when I got back home.
I'd been working for about five years on a modern reimagining of the Tom Lehrer song book... And so for two reasons. One, because he is the greatest comedy songwriter of all time, and secondly, because I owe him a huge, a huge vote of thanks for his role in the success I've had.
The thing with Neil Hannan's writing is so much of it is poetry. And the other thing about this song... a lot of this writing is tragic comic, which is I guess what I write myself and I guess a lot of what life actually is.
San Diego SerenadeFavourite
The first track that played on Shuffle when I asked Tom Waits to calm me down on the flight and he badly let me down with this one. It's a beautiful, beautiful song and again, it's a piece of poetry.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:59Is there a comparison between the adrenaline rush of performing live and the adrenaline rush of scrubbing up to go into surgical theatre?
Well, that's the thing. That's the thing. Being a doctor totally ruins your barometer for what you get excited, or scared, or anything about. I never get scared going on stage because what's the worst that can happen? Everyone asks for a refund, or they throw things at me, or boo constantly for an hour. Ultimately, none of that matters. It's like people say at work, you know, no one's gonna die. But they're not. But in my old job, they would, and it would be my fault if they did.
Presenter asks
8:31When did you first think you might be gay?
It hadn't occurred to me, but it occurred to someone else. There was a guy when I was in the third year, so as was then called to when I was thirteen, who ran a lending library of printed pornography. No one had the internet, but his dad's computer had the internet and he printed off all these mucky stories. And he said, um, you're gay, right? And I sort of like blustered and didn't quite say anything. But there was no judgment. He just wanted to make sure that I was going to be a good repeat customer and I'd be given the the the the niche of printed material that that I wanted.
Presenter asks
17:12The keepsakes
The book
York Notes for the Complete Works of Shakespeare
York Notes
I never quite know what's going on in Shakespeare... I'd love to know what's going on.
The luxury
I write in my diary every day, and first degree relatives aside, I think that would be the thing that I miss the most if I didn't have.
What was the trigger for the eating disorder you developed in your third year at medical school?
The next morning he told me that I wasn't bad for a big lad. It had never occurred to me that I was a big lad. I was just I basically didn't take in any calories for the best part of a year. Basically chewing food and spitting it out. That involved an awful lot of lying, why I wouldn't be going out for dinner, because that's obviously something I can only do in my my bedroom. I was spitting food into a into a big black bin. After a year I got rumbled because someone did come into my room and then found this, you know, litres and litres and litres of chewed up crisps and whatever and I mean And made me promise that I would get help. Did you? No, because I thought that if I got help I mean I've had help since, but at the time I didn't. I thought that if I spoke to someone about it, then by the time the door had closed behind me afterwards someone would have told the head of the medical school, the secretary of state for health, the chief executive of the hospital, that whoever I would never get a job. I think a lot of doctors, not that I was a doctor then, but a lot of doctors don't get help because they're afraid that It will somehow end their careers.
Presenter asks
21:58What happened that day when you were called in to carry out an emergency caesarean in 2010?
I was the most senior doctor working on the ward. It was me and someone who was more junior to me. And She started the operation, I was assisting and there was a condition called placenta previa, which means the placenta is too low, and it should have been picked up on scans and for whatever reason hadn't been. And I took over the operation and delivered the baby, and the baby was clearly dead. And then the uterus wouldn't stop bleeding. And um I was doing my best and called in my consultant. She called in another consultant um who uh made the decision to perform a hysterectomy. Twelve litres of blood or something had been lost. All you ever want is a healthy mum and a healthy baby and this patient went off to intensive care and I'd ended up with neither. And my friends who had known what had happened would Reminds me that in order to make me feel better, they'd remind me I hadn't done anything wrong. And anyone in that situation would have done the same thing and had the same outcome. I couldn't have known, and this and that. And they would tell me that every five or six years, if you're the most senior obstetrician on the ward, you will have some kind of big disaster. And it's not about how good you are or how much training you've got. It's just the horrible nature of the beast. That made me feel worse, not better, because it made me realize that I couldn't face that kind of thing ever happening to me ever again, let alone twice a decade. And so I Stepped away from Madison.
Presenter asks
26:28When you first started working on the book, did you have any qualms about revealing too much about what was happening behind the scenes in the hospital?
There are a couple of things. There's the legal side of things. Obviously, you can't identify... The legal read on the first draft of the book was about the same length as the actual book. Second side of things was the worry about will this put people off medicine. I've had, you know, since the book came out, various angry messages from parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles saying my son, daughter, niece, nephew, grandchild used to want to be a doctor and then they read your book and now they don't. What have you got to say about that? And the answer, I'm afraid, is good because if that book is going to put you off medicine, then medicine is really going to put you off medicine.
Presenter asks
29:34Tell me about your family life today.
We have a very boring life. Well we did until six months ago. Now, and this isn't something that I've spoken about before, there is no calm whatsoever because we've got two very young babies, Ruby, who's six months, and Ziggy, who's two months. I don't need to explain the way that having kids changes your life, but it's absolutely transformed it for the better and also ruined it.
“Being a doctor totally ruins your barometer for what you get excited, or scared, or anything about.”
“I was living in the wrong household.”
“I think a lot of doctors don't get help because they're afraid that it will somehow end their careers.”
“All you ever want is a healthy mum and a healthy baby and this patient went off to intensive care and I'd ended up with neither.”
“I've got a two-month-old child. I'm going to get some sleep. Let's look for the positives here.”