'What's the polar opposite of being shafted by the NHS?" That's how my senior house officer announced that she was ditching me for the world of investment banking. The move, like everything else she has ever done, was exercised with almost military precision. I know that baby doctors tend to mythologise the mystical powers of their immediate superiors. We are, after all, dependent on them for matters of life and death, and they can pull some pretty amazing stuff out of the bag sometimes. This was no exception: a study week, scrounged for membership exams, she spent on work experience with Mammon himself; a 20-book reading list of unrelenting tedium before the interview; swotting the financial pages every day for a year on the way to work. I don't know where she gets the staying power. Oh, yes I do.

"In my new company," she said, "when you work late, they get you a taxi home." We were walking back over to the concrete bunker where they keep the junior doctors at night. It was two in the morning. "They arrange for food to be delivered from the restaurant downstairs." She waved at the vending machine full of instant meals (dry ones that don't even need refrigerating) which lives at the bottom of our staircase, as we wandered into the mess. "And they have a gym in the basement, and a swimming pool full of money."

We started fantasising about having our own house-officer butlers. "A call from 7E, sir, on the other side of the hospital. Shall I fetch your carriage around?" "Yes Jeeves, and this coffee's a bit shit. Send down to the kitchen will you old boy?" But my heart was heavy with loss.

My first SHO is leaving me, I thought, as we sat in the squalor of the mess. But I will never forget the way she helped me through the tears of my first dead patient, and taught me the correct approach to the grieving family. "You've been so kind doctor." "That's okay, I only filled out the blood forms," you reply. "Now hand over the chocolates, I've got crem fees to collect." And we fell asleep in front of the telly amongst the discarded coffee cups and cigarettes, lovingly, in each other's arms. Well, almost.

Half an hour later I was bleeped back into consciousness with a call to the haematology ward, to stick a drip line in some kid who was having a blood transfusion. Haematology wards are full of people who get transfused their whole lives, and their veins are fibrous and thrombosed by the time the nurses are calling people like me over to cannulate them.

This guy looked about 12. "Hi," I said. He looked up from his book like I was the butler. "How old are you?" I asked, doing my best to deploy a slightly dishevelled brand of early-morning paediatric bedside friendliness. "I'm 31, you prick. It's thalassaemia. It makes me look younger." Fabulous. "You'd better get this in first time, you know. The nurses have already fucked up my left arm." I smiled: which is what you'd do. "Jesus Christ," he sighed, and started back at his book.

I opened up the shrink-wrapped bits of kit I needed to stick a line into his nasty little veins, thinking about (in order): how nice it would be to get back into bed; how amazing it was that I had managed to qualify knowing so little haematology; and how cool it would be if you could buy some kind of magic beam that would morph shitty nurses and patients into beatific angels on sight.

So his comment - "That nurse has got fabulous tits" - felt like a bit of a turning point in our doctor-patient relationship. I looked up, grinning, but held fast to neutral territory. "I wouldn't know about that, sir," I replied, reaching for my saline flush, and feeling pretty good about getting the line in first time. "I can't believe you called me sir. You called me sir. You really think I'm 31. You must know fuck all." He laughed noisily in the direction of the nursing station to get their attention, with his eyes wide open. "This doctor knows fuck all! He thinks I'm 31! You fuckwit!" The patients around us start waking up. I think about making a sharp exit, or at least a sharp remark (or maybe just clouting him), but then remember I'm the doctor. I'd guess it must get pretty boring, being a kid in a hospital.