You catch me at a bit of a bad moment. I mean, if you'd been paying any attention to what I've been telling you over the past 10 weeks - cripes, look at how impatient I've become - you would be under the impression that my whole life is an unending series of bad moments, death, disease, dishonour, dismay, and all the other junior doctor stuff. But that's not true. I've worked it all out now: it only seems shit when you're not there.
So, on Sunday morning, after two nights of four hours' sleep, after the weekend when winter came early for the relentlessly diseased inhabitants of our catchment area - a weekend which I had inadvertently started with a hangover - my skin was blotchy, my eyes were red, my head was throbbing, and I was in seventh heaven.
I had seen dozens of patients, two of whom were kicking-off simultaneously before my very eyes (meaning that one of them was definitely my problem) and I was loving every nanosecond. Every nurse was my friend, every vein caught first time, and the symptoms and signs were arranging themselves into neat little frameworks of recognisable pathology.
I might not have been the best doctor in the world, but I was there in the fray, coping with my job, running through protocols and affecting an air of empathic sensitivity whilst feeling pretty damn' butch, I can tell you.
Whereas right now, I am sitting at a kitchen table in the flat of my oldest friend, digesting some home-cooked food, listening to a record, smoking a cigarette, surrounded by home comforts, and I feel utterly dismal. The coming weekend, another on-call (by a cruel accident of our barmy rota) hangs over me like a threat. I am watching the clock and calculating exactly how little sleep I can get away with and still function tomorrow. I'd be OK if the outside world didn't exist.
I suspect that what you really want to hear about are disasters. Unhappy as I am to oblige (to a frail mortal such as myself, this "when doctors kill" business on the telly is a bit demoralising) let me at least furnish you with a paradox. I discover to my astonishment that I am not entirely without worth in the hospital.
On Saturday, casualty was knee-deep. They were crawling up the walls in the waiting room, so our consultant, demonstrating a breathtakingly egalitarian outlook, grabbed the fresh new medical student and announced that he would go and clerk in a couple of the new patients.
There are two things that should immediately strike you about this scenario. First, the fact that there is a medical student in the hospital on a Saturday morning is something I find deeply threatening, since when I was a student, Saturday (much like Friday and Monday) was a day of rest.
Second, consultants do not clerk patients. They write papers on diseases that no one ever gets. For the most part, they float in once a week and spend two hours being nice to you about all the easy patients you have managed in a fairly mediocre fashion.
They sit in committee meetings (I am told) comparing their immense private-practice pay cheques under the table, chuckling over the government's new rules for incoming consultants which state that they must do NHS work exclusively for the first seven years of their contract, and roaring with laughter over the extra clientele this will bring them.
My own consultant, almost uniquely, takes you aside for regular chats where you feel that if you really wanted, you could probably confess that you drop into the toilets for the occasional cry about once a week, and he would have some sound advice to offer on the subject. Consultants do not clerk patients in the casualty department.
Three hours later he emerged, calmly announced that everything was in hand, rather impressively using the word "sorted" - which I can only assume he picked up from our streetwise teenage medical student - and no-one dared or thought to question the matter as the patients clamoured at the windows outside.
After another three hours, it transpired that the patient in question had no blood tests done, no drug chart, no chest X-ray, no medication, and had no bed booked. Finally I saw that I did have my own humble little place in the world, after all. Our leader spoke some more of his many wise words whilst striding off the ward. "This medicine lark, you know, endlessly fascinating. I've forgotten more than I ever knew."
