Someone's pulled the grass from underneath my feet: one moment I'm a medical house officer in a glamorous and well-funded central teaching hospital, the next I'm a skivvy for a bunch of surgeons in some district general hospital's concrete box in the middle of nowhere. How did this happen?
It's all part of a grand experiment to disorient and abuse junior doctors. Every six months they move you on to some new alien hospital, and to get full registration with the general medical council you have to do six months of surgery as well as six months of medicine, for one very simple reason: surgeons, who make up about 10% of medical graduates, need a vast army of (barely) qualified medical skivvies to do their dirty work on the wards.
What do we know about doing surgery? Nothing. We are Santa's little helpers. As my new senior house officer pointed out on the first day of the job: "I am the SHO. You are the HO." He likes Eminem. I hold retractors in the theatre. I do bloods and cannulas. I write the results in the notes. I am barely still a doctor, apart from pre-op clinics. "Do you have any allergies? No. Still got that hernia? Jolly good, get your ECG over there. Next."
With time the repetitiveness could become quite therapeutic, in the same way that knitting or raffia work might. And as ever in medicine there is always scope for invigoratingly serious cock-ups.
What is particularly cutting is that this all has to take place in a hospital in an anonymous little market town somewhere between 20 and 60 miles outside of London. Let's call it Boreham General.
Like all other district generals I ever went to as a medical student, you just pitch up at that train station on your first day of work and aim for the big incinerator tower. When we were at medical school, we used to consider our brief sojourns to places like this as cautionary tales.
"I'd better concoct a pretty convincing CV before I qualify," we would all secretly plot in the college library, "because otherwise I'll end up working in Boreham General for the rest of my life, like all those other lost souls."
So here I sit, staring blankly at the walls, in Bedside Manor, the small concrete bunker where they keep the junior doctors at night when they are not using them. I could go out with my new colleagues and drink to excess, once more, in the plastic pub around the corner. Or I could sit in my room and stare blankly at the walls. Some of the other HOs are old hands at district general life.
"Bedside Manor? This is a bloody palace," they say in broad Yorkshire accents. "When I were a lad, in Borebury General, the on-call doctor slept at t'bottom of t'sharps bin, snuggled up against t'used needles and empty glass vials, and we used to wash in t'dirty utility room on t'ward next to t'used colostomy bags."
But don't let me knock the old place. Because for everything I might say, there is one thing about this hospital that left me utterly disorientated for days: everybody, and I mean everybody, is outrageously, absurdly, almost surreally friendly. "Good morning doctor," they chirp. "Hi . . ." I replied for the first few days, trying not to look suspicious.
But it's real. This is the only hospital in the town. Patients do not routinely abuse you. The little old lady in the Friends hospital shop, which still sells Curly Wurlys for 17p please dear: we know each other by name. Her shop is not a prefabricated corporate franchise on a unit of glisteningly valuable retail space in a busy hospital foyer. To be honest, it looks like she built it herself one quiet weekend in 1972.
And last night we all went out with the nurses to the local out-of-town entertainment multiplex centre, with its seven-screen cinema and three restaurant-bar-nightclub venues, for the fortnightly "999" night. ("Where the emergency services let their hoses out.") I never saw ward sisters in their mid-40s get drunk like that in my old hospital.
Who cares about the art galleries and concerts I was always too tired to make it to in my old job? Who cares if everyone over the age of 19 is married around here? Who cares if surgical ward rounds start at quarter to eight in the morning? At least they're over by nine. If I were 20 years older, and my social life had been neatly cauterised by a collection of small children, I might seriously consider bringing them up somewhere not entirely unlike this town.