By the time you read this, as long as it's after half past eight in the morning, I will be a doctor. By which I mean, of course, that I will have started working as one; since passing my finals three weeks ago I have already been a doctor for the purposes of upgrading my aeroplane seat (unsuccessfully), feeling rather big and clever, and impressing my partner.
So now I am left with an anxious blend of excitement and horror as I slide uncontrollably towards Tuesday morning and come to terms with the fact that I really am going to start work as a doctor, and not a pop star as I had previously planned. This is the week that every new doctor in the country starts work in his or her first hospital job - a famously good week to stay well.
To be honest, and it pains me, I have never felt more comprehensively unprepared for anything in my life. Medical school is a five-year conveyor belt of human experience. Since I started I have delivered babies to single mothers with no family support, discussed impotence with builders twice my age, and sat chatting to old ladies as they slipped gradually away without a visit from their relatives; I flatter myself that I've got on pretty well with most of my patients. What bothers me, though, is those piles of textbooks, those endless exams I seemed somehow to scrape through, and I wonder how I can possibly be any more competent than when I left school.
Even though I may not have been the most diligent medical student ever to don a stethoscope, even though I assumed it was a clerical error when they read my name out on the pass list, even though I have, after all, never really "done" the kidney - and most people have at least one of those - surely I must be the same as any other baby doctor?
If I am not now, I soon will be; my job, like most house officer jobs, is "compulsorily residential", which means I have to live on site, in grim 70s hospital accommodation, surrounded by nothing but other doctors, and far away from the string of friendly shared houses which have been home for the past five years. Given that I only have to stay to work through the night a trifling "one in four" (as we doctors say), it's hard not to see the move as some kind of mind control strategy, devised to cut me off from the normalising influence of the outside world. Perhaps I'm being overly suspicious. After all, I haven't yet seen my room; I can't move in until the evening of my first day on the job, a few hours after the previous crop of house officers has moved on. There is, for obvious practical reasons, no rest for the saintly.
But I mustn't grumble; there exists, as far as I can tell, a conspiracy of butchness among doctors, a determination to downplay the heroics. Maybe it all starts to seem pedestrian pretty quickly. A house officer, too, is plankton, the lowest of the low. Emergencies and stints in casualty excepted, I will be for the most part a highly trained form-filling machine, and even if I do work a "one in four", that does always include four hours of what they rather sweetly call "semi-protected sleep".
T he urge to conform, to melt into the background and look the part, has never been greater, and to this end I have been passing my last few days of freedom (70 hours a week - don't think about it) working on a grown-up doctor's outfit.
Something respectable, dashing, but not too showy, maybe a hint of 50s chic (I'm thinking Dirk Bogarde in Doctor in the House) to appeal to our older clientele, but all I have found so far are big fat carrot trousers in department stores that balloon at the waist and taper at the ankle, which are so painfully the opposite of everything I have previously looked for in a pair of pants that I can hardly bear to force them onto my overdraft.
In the end, my greatest fear is of being left alone. I know they are supposed to handle me with kid gloves; I know that for the first week they are expecting me to be useless. But what about when, as they like to phrase it in finals, "your senior cover is busy at an emergency, and you are called to see a man on the ward with chest pains?"
