So there I am, picking pubic hairs off the soap in the doctor's on-call shower, when suddenly the immense historical significance of this moment strikes me: tomorrow, all the rotas in the hospital change. Tomorrow the trust becomes New Deal-compliant. And tonight we will be the last doctors in this hospital ever to work 33 hours in a row. If I hadn't been in the shower, you might have caught a fond tear of remembrance falling from the corner of my eye.

I went to the doctors' mess and announced the significance of this moment, and we wept for lost friends. I remember so well, during a night on call with not a jot of sleep, how Phoebe slipped on the stairs on the way to an arrest bleep and ended up with her leg in a cast for six weeks. How we laughed.

Waites remembered how his girlfriend would playfully bottle up all the frustration of nights without him, and engage him in lovers' tiffs we could all hear from the other end of the accommodation block, as he wept and begged for sleep. How we all smiled.

You cannot even begin to imagine what sleep deprivation on that scale is really like, and I can hardly imagine it being over. There are moments of horrible madness and desperation. I keep quiet, for example, about the awful lonely moment I thought I might actually be losing my mind - no sleep for 50 hours, walking through empty hospital corridors, with my nerves buzzing, these fine vibrations in my perception, as if the whole world was shimmering backwards and forwards, and the sound of I Could Have Danced All Night from My Fair Lady blasting just a little bit too loud in my head.

But now it's gone. No more will I stand by the roll-up doors at four in the morning, where the Moonraker buggies with the meals and the linen go into the hospital basement, smoking a cigarette and pretending I'm James Bond.

It's a con, of course. They are taking us off an on-call rota, where we work all day, all night, and then all of the next night, and putting us on weeks of nights and extended days until nine. But there are no more doctors, and there is still just as much work to be done, and the total hours don't change: it's just rejigged so that you do shorter on-calls more frequently. Just like before, if you add up the number of extra days and hours we do, because you don't get a day off in the week to compensate, it's roughly the same over a year as if we did a normal job, but with no holiday, ever. The only thing that's changed is the extreme sports sleep deprivation stuff.

Please just employ more doctors. It's very simple.

So anyway, as is traditional after a night on call, I drive home to have dinner with my parents, who I adore most at my weakest moments, and announce this historic moment to my dad. He sniffs over the peas. "When I were a lad, we used to do a one in two on call, up every other night. And we used to sleep at the bottom of t'sharps bin, and be glad of it."

My mum looks up. "Well, it was kind of different then, dear." She smiles. "Don't you remember how I used to hide under the duvet when the porters brought you your cup of tea in the morning?" Tea in bed on call? We're lucky if they keep the canteen open after eight. "And remember how angry you were that morning, when you realised you'd forgotten to leave your shoes outside the door to be polished?"

And then it all comes out. They had silver service. Really, properly: dinner on call was laid out in the doctors' mess on silver trays. And my dad's not that old. They would hang out in the on-call room, playing pool. Occasionally a nurse would call them to the wards, where they would have laid out the notes, and the drug charts that needed doing, ready for you when you got there. And when someone had a cardiac arrest, well, there wasn't much you could do about it anyway. You would just think, "Oh dear", jot something in the notes, and potter off back to bed.

Now I'm not asking for anyone to bow down to me, because it's weird and gross and wrong. But at least then they were looked after. Just please employ more doctors, and give me back my life.