Adam Kay was born in 1980 and came to Dulwich Prep in 1985, soon followed by his younger brothers Marc and Daniel.  All three were Mohicans and all went on to the College. Adam chose to follow in the footsteps of his doctor father and read Medicine at Imperial College. As an undergraduate he started performing in medical school shows and founded the musical comedy group Amateur Transplants, which frequently performed at the Edinburgh Fringe, and also wrote for BBC Radio 4. For a number of years he was an obstetrician and gynaecologist. Life as a doctor can be very stressful and his coping mechanism was to record the highs and lows of his day in a diary,
A decade ago he gave up medicine for a career as a writer and comedian - kicking off with a runaway stand-up show that became the bestselling memoir This Is Going to Hurt, based on those diaries he had kept as a junior doctor.
He is guilty of consulting medical friends rather than going to a hospital or GP surgery himself which is how he ended up with pneumonia in May, just after his sister’s wedding. He has now started thinking about his health, which doctors are very bad at, and going for a jog.
The long hours he worked as a doctor, the arrogance of consultants and his frustration with the health secretary Jeremy Hunt all contributed to Kay’s disillusionment with his vocation. But it was a traumatic day in surgery when he delivered a stillborn baby to a mother who lost 12 litres of blood through no fault of his, which caused him to finally leave the profession. His schedule now still sounds hectic - doing a show in the West End one night, then going to Edinburgh for a couple of nights, whilst writing the TV show of This Is Going to Hurt. With the book coming out in the States at Christmas, Adam was also going over there to try and convince them that universal healthcare’s actually a very good thing.
On top of this he has recorded an Audible Original series, What Seems to be the Problem, with his friend and fellow comedian Mark Watson. In each hour-long chapter they discuss past, present and future medical attitudes to a particular organ: the brain, the penis, the womb, the gut. Kay’s impish wit will be familiar to those who have read or heard This is Going to Hurt, in which anecdotes swing from the hilarious to the horrific and sometimes embrace both.
It’s hard to remember from his cheery, bantering manner that Kay was responsible for life-and-death decisions for as long as he has been responsible only for making people laugh. He got into obstetrics and gynaecology, he says, because most of the time you end up with twice the number of patients you started with, which is not the case in any other branch of medicine. And he becomes sombre and sad when I ask about the case that broke him. “It was a placental obstruction,” he says. “All you ever want on a labour ward is a healthy mum and a healthy baby, and sadly there are times that doesn’t happen.
“It wasn’t the first time I’d had a bad day at work, but it was the very worst thing that had happened, and the first time I was the most senior person in the room. When you are a doctor you don’t talk about this stuff very much, you don’t tell your mates and you don’t tell your partner. Some well-meaning people did remind me that something like that will happen every five or six years. That didn’t make me realise it was normal and that I hadn’t failed. It made me realise I couldn’t face that happening twice a decade.”
Kay thinks that the NHS could offer more support and counselling to doctors, but also that people in the UK choose medicine too early, effectively during A levels, before they can really know if they are suited to it. “America gets healthcare almost completely wrong,” he says, “but one thing they get right is that it’s almost exclusively a postgraduate degree.”
His entry into the profession was pretty much a foregone conclusion. He comes from a Jewish family — though says they’re “mostly in it for the food” — from south London and his father, brother, sister-in-law and sister are doctors. Another brother, the “black sheep”, studied law and now works in marketing. Kay went to Dulwich College (“home of Nigel Farage”) before studying medicine at Imperial. He didn’t come out as gay to his family until his late twenties — “I wish I’d done it sooner, because I want to be a better role model” — but his parents were “totally cool” about it. He jokes that he’s still not sure if they have forgiven him for quitting medicine, though.
Kay doesn’t miss the hours, or the grind, or the politics of being a doctor. He was relieved when Hunt was replaced by Matt Hancock at the Department of Health, and that Hunt didn’t become prime minister. “It is the very definition of damning with faint praise, but I can absolutely claim that Matt Hancock is more competent than Jeremy Hunt.” But Kay is worried about the effect of Brexit on the NHS and the decline in staff numbers. “We’re over 100,000 staff short in the NHS. That needs to be urgently addressed, and it’s going to cost a lot more money than £1.8 billion [the sum recently offered by Boris Johnson] that may or may not already have been promised.”
Is there anything about hospital life he misses? “Yeah, I miss helping people. That’s the reason every doctor and every healthcare professional does their job, which was why it was so heart-breaking to hear doctors being misrepresented as doing it for the money at the time of the strikes. There are much more efficient ways of converting A levels into dollar signs than via six years of medical school and many years on the wards. I miss colleagues. And I miss being part of the NHS, which is our greatest achievement as a civilised nation, and we need to do everything we can to protect it.”