‘Enjoy,’ Max says, leaning back in his chair and putting his hands behind his head, the relaxed posture of a man not doing a surgical term. He looks over at Estelle. ‘Hey, on a different note, have medical admin emailed to tell you when you have to go out bush?’

Estelle nods. As interns we all have to spend ten weeks out in rural Australia, to work at Holy Innocents’ sister hospital that isn’t staffed by enough local doctors. ‘Next term, mate. Me and Kitty are going together. God, I can’t believe that they’re shipping us out to the middle of fucking nowhere,’ she continues, bemoaning the fate of junior doctors forced to go on remote secondments. ‘Do you think I could get out of it somehow?’

‘At least we’re going together,’ I point out, grabbing my bag. ‘Imagine if we were going it alone.’

I’m not really looking forward to living in the bush for ten weeks either, but that’s a while off yet and, in the meantime, things here seem to be improving, what with Dr Prince becoming an unexpected ally and a new woman on the team.

I take a wrong turn on my way up to the ward, and find myself lost near the operating theatres. Theatres are on level five, and I feel irritated with myself. The surgical ward is level seven, so I have no idea how I’ve somehow exited the stairwell two floors below it. The long corridors and fluorescent lights, connected by lifts and staircases, make the hospital almost impossible for me to navigate. I’m bad at map-reading at the best of times; I need a GPS just to find certain parts of my workplace.

I’ve decided to use the stairwell as much as possible; at least the stairs act as some kind of familiar starting point. I feel like I spend half my day trying to find things, or places. Conveniently, there are phones everywhere. This is good and bad. It means as soon as my pager beeps the nurses know there’s no excuse to not respond immediately. Every corner has an internal hospital phone sitting on it. Even then it doesn’t really matter, because they’ll just call my mobile number anyway. All of the interns’ phone numbers are splashed all over the wards. So much for respecting my privacy. I run from the surgical ward on seven, down to theatres on five (so far the only reason I’ve gone to theatres is to give the Joker his coffee), back to seven, and the cycle goes on. My favourite level is three, because that’s where the cafeteria is.

‘Shouldn’t they pay for us to have a work phone, don’t you think?’ Max asked me earlier as my phone rang continuously, with the dreaded extension of the hospital switchboard. ‘You are on your phone constantly.’