I have been reduced to hiding patients from my consultant. You try telling him that the little old lady whose gall bladder he has whipped out can't go home, just because some occupational therapist says she can't make a cup of tea safely in the practice kitchen. "Out!" he shouts (and he does really shout it) waving his arms around at head height, and moves on to the next patient.

Now, naturally I assumed that this was no more than rather camp affectation on his part: but the same afternoon, the sister on ward 6B bleeps to let me know she has "sorted out" Mrs Henderson. "You know how upset John can get," she says, referring to our consultant surgeon (whose name is Mr Cobb, and definitely not John) as if she were his devoted and long-suffering wife.

The next morning the patient has indeed disappeared. Until the nurses on 3C, an orthopaedic ward, bleep me after lunchtime. "When are you coming to see your patient, then?" (I don't know if you could hear the silent "you bastard" on the end of that sentence). Sitting in the corner is dear old Mrs Henderson, and she still doesn't have a clue where she is. Neither does my consultant: as far as he is concerned, she's back festering in sheltered accommodation. After the mess he made of her insides, I was amazed she even woke up, but there it is. Don't tell anyone, for God's sake.

The patients who have been around for a while think this is all very entertaining. Mr Parkett has been moored to the ward by his ropey waterworks since before I arrived. He has been having secret rendezvous with Mrs Henderson in the smoking room, and now knows that I too have secret liaisons with her, at the end of every ward round.

Unfortunately, I'm not allowed to chat with him like I used to, because he has offended sister. Deluded, perhaps, by the sheer volume of attention that has been lavished on his penis, and the central role it has come to play in his life, he has taken to wearing it outside his trousers (sometimes he just wears anti-blood clot stockings up to his thighs and a rather louche open dressing gown). "I'm not going to talk to you until you put your penis away, Mr Parkett." I say with a broad smile, on sister's instructions, and he rolls his eyes.

So, as you can see, I'm on the wards all day and I'm bored. All the action in surgery happens in out-patients (which is fairly boring) or theatre (which is very boring). All day all I do is paperwork and drip lines. I'm bored of being boring by boring on about it, nobody ever teaches me anything, and even bum jokes aren't funny any more.

I spent the whole of yesterday morning with my eye on a lens attached to a pipe up someone's bum, inflating their colon with air from a pump to get a good view, and replenishing it as it blew out of the margins of their anus, occasionally with such force that I could feel its cool wind against my nose. It wasn't funny. It wasn't even gross. I can have tea and cake in an atmosphere misty with bowel gas without even a twitch. But it is very, very boring.

The only interesting thing about my job is when I get to bear witness to the ball-breaking insensitivity of surgeons. "Your toes," they start to shout, as we walk up to the foot of a bed. "Yes doctor?" replies a little old lady in a floral nightie who, as far as she was concerned, had only popped in to show her GP her cold painful feet out of passing interest. "They'll probably drop off by themselves in the next week or so." And then we rush away to finish the ward round by nine, so that everyone can get to theatre.

But let's go back to that little old lady, because those 14 words were literally all he said to her. "Did I catch that right?" she must surely be thinking. "Did that bloke just tell me my feet are going to fall off? He didn't seem to be making much of an issue out of it. Perhaps I misunderstood."

And worse of all, that brashness, that hurried "I've got something terribly important to do with a big knife over there" stride, is starting to rub off on me. The other day I was a little bit rude to a nurse, albeit a nurse who bleeped me three times in half an hour to write up some non-urgent fluids that she then didn't even bother to put up.

But in medicine you must never forget your place. In medicine the hierarchy is worse even than the military, and the nurses love it: they love having a doctor they can bully, and they think it's so cute when the little baby house officers try and get angry. "I'm not going to talk to you until you put your penis away, Dr Foxton." And that's that.