Being your doctor is worse than being your mum. Unconditional love, that's what you expect. You think that your mortality is so bloody important that it's weird if we want to go home. "Doctor, exactly why hasn't my mother had a normal bowel movement since this morning?" "I'm not going home until I get the result of my scan." Oh yes you are.
Fortunately, the unreasonable bad behaviour of the unappeasable few has allowed me to develop a professional emotional distance. I have been watching, and it has happened to all of us. We are cleaved from the reality of your pain. Those moments when the nurses bleeped to tell us that Mr P's family were here again, demanding to see a doctor (about why being fat and eating shit gives you bowel cancer, perhaps) and making ludicrous grunting noises about going to the press and the General Medical Council: we shan't be staying late for them any more. Thank you, and bad luck.
Fortunately, people are still sticking interesting things up their bottoms to keep us all in good spirits. I am called from my bleary sleep at three in the morning and curse my way across the barren snow-cursed wasteland that separates my room from the hospital, to find as I wake on arrival that I am wearing theatre bottoms, a white coat, an orange scarf, a woolly hat and a medical school t-shirt with the phrase "diseases are afraid of me" scribbled across the front.
Nights on call are so weird you sometimes wonder if they ever really happened at all. "Did I really wake up at three in the morning when my bleep went off, and spend 20 minutes heroically (and single-handedly) managing a torrential gastrointestinal bleed before retiring once more to my bed?" I sometimes wonder. "Or did I merely answer the phone, mumble some reassuring sleep-fudge to the nurse, go back to sleep, and dream the entire episode? If so, did the patient die? And will I consequently be arrested?"
Anyway, it's not every day that you get called to see a patient with a parsnip lodged in their anus. Root vegetables in general are pretty popular, apparently, but don't let me get away with being sage about it: this was my first vegetable-in-arse call. I was delighted, but my professionalism was breathtaking.
Now, for the purposes of this anecdote, there are certain things you have to know about surgeons. For historical reasons their hobbies are sport, sexism and homophobia, and although there are almost certainly some female surgeons somewhere I've never seen one. An example of surgeons in action: if I am not able to hold a retractor for long enough in theatre, this is because I am either a "poofter" or a "big fat girl".
Outraged? I suppose they don't mean any harm. They're just overqualified manual labourers with aspirations to working-class chic, which they get a little bit wrong. They think it's big and clever. So what if they're doctors. I'm too tired to think about it.
Anyway, this patient has a parsnip up his arse - I cannot even be bothered with the explanation - and we have to get it out. God knows why he can't shit it out. But there you go, I'm just a house officer, I'm as much in the dark as you are on most stuff. Needless to say, I call for senior assistance. First the senior house officer tries his hand, but every time he thinks he's caught it, the tapered end slips further in. Then we think about instruments, but the registrar is worried about perforating the bowel. There is only one option: we sit on it.
In theatre next morning we find our patient once more on his side, this time lightly anaesthetised. Apparently, there is a scene out there for using ketamine as an aid to fisting, the anaesthetist tells me. I pretend not to know what either of those things are because I'm too tired to cope with a weird conversation. Everyone gets down to business.
The SHO successfully grasps the misplaced vegetable through the grossly dilated orifice and begins to edge back. The tension in the room is almost unbearable. All eyes are upon him, and as he eases the offending vegetable gently out, success seems imminent. As the sprouts clear the anal verge, suddenly the patient's flaccid penis begins to twitch, and then emits a steady stream of sticky grey fluid. No one can realistically deny it is semen.
Everyone turns to the SHO, and the SHO turns to the registrar looking concerned. The registrar holds his index finger aloft and raises an eyebrow: clearly this is the most urgent question of his entire homophobic sparring career. He is genuinely inquisitive. "Charles, darling. does that make you gay?"
