Surgeons are far from being the intellectuals of the medical world. "It's funny, surgery," I said to my senior house officer one day. "Sometimes it almost seems too straightforward: you know, someone has a bit of cancer in their bowel, we chop it out and stick the ends together; someone has a gammy leg with blocked blood vessels, so we chop it off and make a stump."

He looks at me, baffled, scraping his knuckles along the corridor floor as we walk towards the endoscopy department. "That's exactly what we do," he says.

We walk past the physiotherapist with whom I have been unsuccessfully flirting for three months. "Now, I need you to book an urgent rigid bell-endoscopy for that physio, and I'll see you in theatre in five minutes."

Dear God, not the operating theatre. Four hours of holding a retractor while the consultant points out a few bits of gristle, claiming they represent some anatomical structure I'd forgotten ever existed. The worst of it all is that now, after three months in the job, they keep trying to involve me in the chopping side of things. "Closer to the vein, follow the vein, dissect it out with the scissors - closer, don't be such a girl."

Christ, I think, have you seen the size of that thing? It's a huge pipe full of blood and all your shouting is giving me the shakes. This could get messy. "Come on, come on, we're going to cut it out anyway - she's got bloody varicose veins you fool, just dissect it down and make sure there's nothing funny going on." There is nothing funny going on. "Right, now clamp it, open the fucker up and stick this vein stripper down the hole." I look up as he passes me what looks like a bit of straightened out coathanger.

There are times, when the mood takes him, that my consultant will try and make the work of a surgeon sound technical and sophisticated. I'm sure it's not just pretence. I'm sure they really do need an extensive lexicon of technical terms to describe what are undeniably very dextrous and careful manoeuvres. "Come on, come on, stick it down and wiggle it around, you're stripping the veins off, not catheterising your boyfriend, get on with it."

The vein starts to give a bit more, and gingerly I pull it back. It makes a sound like poppers opening up in quick succession on the back of a dress, as each connecting tributary gives way. My surgical mask hides the expression of disgust that causes my mouth spontaneously as I feel the vein popping a few millimetres looser with each tug, and ease it out. I work on the perforators with the funny little hook they use, poking it into the holes my SHO impatiently pokes with a pointed blade, and rooting around to see if I can pull out a stringy, bogey-like vein. It's actually rather satisfying and a bit like picking your nose: I find myself more and more absorbed in the process as I clean out dear old Mrs G's nasty varicose veins.

And then, to my horror, I realise that I have been conned into doing an operation. And I feel pretty good about it. OK, this poor woman's legs are in a right old state. But she's just had surgery, and that's just the way it is. I start to wash off the blood, quietly feeling rather professional as I sweep the brown antiseptic swab over her bloody calves. It all looks pretty damn good to me, and I look up hoping to catch my consultant smirking proudly. But he has run off to whine about hospital management in the coffee room, and there is just me and the SHO, who is quietly staring at the anaesthetist's breasts as she reads the newspaper.

Needless to say, I feel rather big and clever about the whole episode, until I watch Mad Max on telly in the mess in the afternoon. I realise that whereas I might be pretty good at filling in forms and dishing out antiobiotics (and after nine months in the game I have to say I'm pretty damn good at it), and even if I can do varicose veins all by myself with a coathanger, one thing is certain: in a post-holocaust, urban-warrior situation after the revolution comes, when western society as we know it is in a state of terminal disarray and my insurgent revolutionary chums and me are hiding out in the foothills of some mountain range and they look at me as if I have the first clue what to do about our walking wounded, I'd still be worse than useless.