This is Going to Hurt may seem like the stuff of fiction - but shockingly it's all too real.
The BBC's new series follows junior doctor Adam Kay, who is played by James Bond's Q actor Ben Whishaw, as he works agonising 97-hour-a-week shifts.
The comedy, which also seriously tugs at the heart strings, actually comes from a true story as it's based on the adaptation of the real Adam's NHS memoir This Is Going To Hurt.
Published in 2017, Adam's award-winning bestseller became a global phenomenon and has been translated into 20 languages.
Revealing the highs and lows of working on the NHS frontline, it shone a light on the horrifically long hours and life-saving decisions medics must make while being sleep deprived.
After six years of training and another six years on the wards, Adam resigned as a junior doctor in 2010, several months after a heartbreaking tragedy involving a baby.
Get the news you want straight to your inbox. Sign up for a Mirror newsletter here .
It was recommended that Adam start writing a diary as a reflective practice throughout his training, which in turn became the basis of his hit book.
Plot lines that have featured on the BBC series did happen in real life, but some of the characters have been created for the series and their experiences expanded on.
In the first episode we saw Adam being called to remove an object from a woman's vagina, which turned out to be a ring she had been planning on proposing to her boyfriend with by asking him to find it.
And he did get concerned a patient was the victim of domestic abuse after finding red stickers on their file, but discovered this was actually because their toddler had been playing with the stickers.
The first death he ever witnessed was horrific as the patient started throwing up huge quantities of blood all over the walls and started choking.
"I peeled off my blood-soaked clothes and we silently changed into scrubs for the rest of the shift," he wrote for the 17 October 2004 entry.
"So there we go, the first death I’ve ever witnessed and every bit as horrific as it could possibly have been. Nothing romantic or beautiful about it."
One of the biggest themes of the book is Adam's struggle to get any time off work, whether that be holiday or sick leave, and working so long he even fell asleep in theatre and in his car.
On Sept 27, 2006 he wrote: "I’m off sick for the first time since qualifying. Work weren’t exactly sympathetic. 'Oh, for f***’s sake,' spat my registrar when I rang in. 'Can’t you just come in for the morning?'"
Then in December 2010 came the heartbreaking death which would eventually lead Adam to resign.
Adam began performing a caesarean section on a mother with undiagnosed placenta praevia, which should have been picked up on scans so that she was not allowed to go into labour.
"I deliver the baby. The baby is clearly dead. The patient is bleeding heavily – one litre, two litres. My sutures have no effect, drugs have no effect. I call for the consultant urgently," writes Adam.
The patient received emergency blood transfusions and a very experienced surgeon was rushed in to perform a hysterectomy -with the bleeding getting under control after two hours and 12 litres of blood loss.
Adam was told to expect the worst and said he cried for an hour while writing up his operations notes - and it was the last diary entry he wrote.
While everyone was kind to him and said it wasn't his fault, Adam struggled mentally over how he might have prevented the death and wasn't even given a day to recover.
He wrote: "I’d seen babies die before. I’d dealt with mothers on the brink of death before. But this was different. It was the first time I was the most senior person on the ward when something terrible happened. It was on me, and I had failed.
"Officially, I hadn’t been negligent and nobody suggested otherwise. But this wasn’t good enough for me. I knew that if I’d been better – super-diligent, super-observant, super-something – I might have saved the baby’s life, saved the mother from permanent compromise.
"That 'might have' was inescapable. Yes, I came back to work the next day. I was in the same skin, but I was a different doctor.
"I went six months without laughing, every smile was just an impression of one – I felt bereaved.
"After a few months I hung up my stethoscope."
Adam worked as an obstetrics and gynaecology trainee for a number of years before leaving medicine for a career in writing.
Five years after he resigned, Adam was officially removed from the medical register in 2015 and decided to get rid of all the files he had been storing.
This led him to look back at his diary entries, which also coincided with junior doctors clashing with the NHS over contract disputes and going on strike.
Adam says he was motivated to publish his diaries when the then Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, accused junior doctors of being greedy.
In September 2017, he said: "As I was reliving this time through my diaries, junior doctors in the here and now were coming under fire from politicians.
"I couldn’t help but feel doctors were struggling to get their side of the story across (probably because they were at work the whole time) and the public weren’t hearing the truth about what it actually means to be a doctor."
He has also been a script writer and editor on TV shows such as Mrs Brown's Boys, Mitchell and Webb and Child Genius and had a sold out Edinburgh Fringe show.
Adam has now adapted his book for the small screen and produced the BBC series This is Going to Hurt, in which he is played by actor Ben Wishaw.
"Ben is quite simply one of the finest actors our country has produced and a national treasure. There’s simply no one who could do a better job of playing – a much more handsome version of – me," said Adam.
While the series is on our screens, Adam is actually going out on the road is his new live show 'This is Going to Hurt...More' with new stories from second memoir Undoctored: The Story of a Medic Who Ran Out of Patients.
Talking about the new tour, Adam said: "It feels like the natural progression of my surreal 2022 to go from Ben Whishaw playing me on television to performing at Wembley. 2023's really going to have up its game – perhaps I'll be made king or move to Jupiter.
"I can't wait to get 'This is Going to Hurt…More' out on the road and subject the UK to more of my repulsive stories."
He also added: "To have the finest actor of his generation playing me? In a career-defining performance? Yeah, it’s OK, I guess."
Speaking in 2020 after he was cast in the new seven-part BBC series, Ben said he was "proud" to portray Adam's experiences of working as a hospital medic.
Ben, who met Adam just twice before filming started due to Covid, said: "I felt and I actually still feel incredibly shy around Adam.
"On the one hand, he's someone I don't know that well, but then I've done this very kind of intimate portrayal of him and his life, so it still feels quite strange to me."
The actor found the book "incredibly funny" and "absolutely devastating" and is in awe of how doctors cope in such a high pressure setting.
"It's an honest, hilarious, heart-breaking look at the great institution and the army of unsung heroes who work there under the most stressful conditions," he said.
Ben added: "I think it’s a time when we’ve all been more aware than normal of just how much we owe to the people who work for the NHS."
During filming for the series, Ben was helped by three amazing doctors who would come down to the set every day from their shifts to act as consultants.
The actor practised on prosthetic body parts, with the doctors telling him where to put his hands and how to move to make the scenes look realistic.
"Well, I thought I was quite good," Ben told the BBC. "And the doctors said that I wasn't bad either. But obviously it's a big difference to transfer from a prosthetic body to a real one. Not a lot in common really between the two."
Ben was also shown how to perform a C-section for his new role and said it was easier than he expected.
Bafta-winner Ben – best known as gadgets expert Q in the 007 movies –plays a junior medic in BBC1’s This Is Going to Hurt.
He said: “We’ve learned how to do Caesareans. I had no idea it was as basic as it is. You take a scalpel, slice through flesh, put your hands in, pull the muscles apart and grab the baby. Things like that are extraordinary."
*This Is Going To Hurt airs tonight on BBC One at 9pm
Do you have a story to sell? Email webfeatures@trinitymirror.com
