I've gone and got bloody Aids. I'll be dead in 10 years. I shall devote myself to working in a lab, desperately struggling to find a cure, which will tragically be developed just weeks after my painful, lingering demise. They will read out at my funeral my last wish, that the fruits of my work should be donated free to an African workers' HIV cooperative, so that others may live on after my pain is over. I've got bloody Aids.

By which I mean, of course, I've had a needlestick injury. Not just any old needlestick injury of course. The kind of needlestick injury where the donor (and what a sweet turn of phrase) is a drug-using alcoholic with psychiatric problems. The kind of donor who is stacked to the gills with every risk factor you can bloody think of, the bastard bastard bastard.

Deep breath. First let me tell you what a good boy I was. I was wearing my rubber gloves. I mean, I may as well have been wearing black satin ballgloves up to my elbows for all the difference they made, but I was wearing them when that idiot flinched his arm, which moved his hand, which pushed my elbow against the cotsides, which stopped me lifting my hand clear, which held the hollow needle filled with poisonous blood, which eased its way gently into my glove.

And when I pulled it off there was a needle-shaped hole in it and when I looked at the side of my thumb there it was! The teeniest little miniscule pinprick, quite possibly even the smallest dot of nothing at all that I have ever seen. I beheld it in awe: should I chop my hand off?

"I know I should be sensitive about this, doctor. But that's the crappiest littlest needlestick injury I've ever seen. In fact, that's not a needlestick injury. It didn't even go into your hand. That's not even where it hit." She held up the glove for comparison. What a cow. I had just contracted bloody Aids and still I was getting bullied by nurses.

Clearly I needed to see a doctor. Top-notch medical cover is a perk in this job, and on this occasion it came in the form of a rather famous A&E consultant. "The drugs only really work if you take them within an hour," he said. Fabulous, I replied: it only happened 10 minutes ago. "Why don't you register at the front desk?" he said. Sounds time-consuming, I thought. What does he think I am: some kind of patient? "How about we just chop my hand off right away and then I can start on some intravenous Aids drugs?"

Neither of us were laughing, so I wasted 10 minutes trying to register in my own A&E department, desperately fighting off visions of lurid computer animations depicting hundreds of little HIV viruses, all busily replicating in my bloodstream. A&E consultants are the hardest people in the world.

So we filled out the forms and he told me the risks and he took some blood for storage and finally I was allowed to get my hands on some ridiculously potent anti-retroviral drugs: three brown tubs of huge yellow horse-medicine tablets. And then I had to wait 36 hours for my senior house officer to nobly but gently convince our acutely delirious (and actually rather sweet) patient that we needed a confidential HIV test on him. The rules on things like consent are made by Guardian-reading do-gooders with cultural studies degrees on committees where everyone wears black polo-neck sweaters, and for a day and a half I was seriously considering switching teams and becoming a reactionary old bigot.

So let me tell you about the drug side-effects. I thought it was bad enough when I took too much aspirin for an earache and it made my haemorrhoids bleed. These HIV drugs are monstrous: my heart heavy with the knowledge that I was over-reacting outrageously, and that the drugs were almost certainly unnecessary, I struggled zombie-like to the toilet every half hour to release another payload of loose, green stool, post on-call with 23 new patients on four hours' sleep, feeling like I was indulging in some morbid kind of disease tourism to the land of HIV positivity. At least it kept my mind off thoughts of my own mortality.

So obviously he was negative. It took me days to recover. And this is what I am thinking right now: it's not too late to get out of acute hospital medicine. Maybe I should bite the bullet, apply for some NHS-issue family doctor sideburns, buy some corduroy trousers, and become a GP.