“I was really struggling and I was made to feel that you shouldn’t say anything, which made things worse. There seems to be nothing so big that you don’t just get on with it – and it’s destructive.” “I found myself fainting during the scan and it really exemplified for me the medic’s approach of ‘you just get on with it’. “It was a pregnancy that wasn’t destined to be,” he recalls. He also reveals that they lost a child, which they discovered during an ultrasound scan in the hospital where he worked. “She knows what’s in the book,” he says today, but is reluctant to elaborate. Looking back, he loved her, but not in the way he needed to – and in the first few weeks after the truth became unavoidable, he was broken, and left medicine and his marriage within a matter of months.
I had fallen in love with a wonderful woman who loved me back,” he writes. “In my mind, it wasn’t a case of hiding who I really was, rather celebrating that I had finally become the person society wanted me to be. They must have felt vindicated when, some years later, he married ‘H’, as he calls her. He came out to his parents when he was at university, only for them to tell him he just hadn’t found the right girl yet. There, he felt like an outsider, battled body image issues and fought loneliness by going against the grain of who he really was in order to fit in. The son of a GP, he writes that his parents essentially pushed him into going to medical school. I mean, what would I say to someone who is doing their own ante-natal care? I’d tell them to see a specialist, a doctor, a midwife.” “I’m probably not a role model for seeking help but I’m a lot better at it, involving experts. But nothing has helped like speaking to friends and professionals about it,” he says. “Ultimately, the nightmares only properly stopped about five years ago when I started talking about it, reading my diaries on stage and recalling this moment I’d kept inside for so long. Time has helped, along with counselling, which he now has regularly. The patient had an undiagnosed placenta praevia the baby died and the mother lost 12 litres of blood and ended up having a hysterectomy. When he left medicine in 2010, Kay suffered nightmares and PTSD – the catalyst was a caesarean which went horribly wrong, when he was the most senior person on the ward. Both a prequel and a sequel, the book features life since he left medicine, forging a comedy and writing career, interspersed with flashbacks to childhood, medic moments, his sexuality and hugely personal events in his life. There’s darkness and anger, peppered as ever with light-hearted moments. In the same way This Is Going To Hurt made you laugh and cry, Undoctored combines Kay’s caustic wit with huge vulnerability.
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