‘ARGHHHHHH!’ screams the patient, jerking his elbow and knocking my now-shaking hand. The cannula pierces the vein all right, but thanks to the unexpected movement it travels straight through it—coming very close to his brachial artery, I realise in horror.

I try to unclip the tourniquet but by now the patient is completely hysterical. I must have nicked his artery because there’s blood squirting from his arm in a pulsating red stream.

At this point I am definitely a better potential escort than angel, I realise mournfully. Or doctor.

‘Is everything okay in here?’ Lawrence, the medical student assigned to me, appears out of nowhere. ‘Did you get the cannula in?’

I refrain from pointing out the obvious, letting the blood-soaked patient, sheet and doctor speak for themselves.

‘You have to keep your arm still,’ I scold the patient. ‘Otherwise this happens.’

‘You didn’t say anything about that!’ he snaps back at me. He looks past me to Lawrence. ‘Is he the doctor? Why isn’t a doctor doing it?’

‘She is the doctor,’ Lawrence says at the same time as I say, ‘I am the doctor.’

The patient, clearly not convinced that someone of my gender is capable of earning a medical degree, pleads with Lawrence—the final-year medical student doing his surgical term under my supervision—to put the cannula in.

Lawrence, being one of those medical students who stays back after hours and stalks the ward on weekends to learn handy skills like cannulation, agrees.

The patient, calmed by the fact that a tall strapping man is taking the reins, relaxes.

‘It’ll be a great learning opportunity for you, Lawrence,’ I say supportively, backing away from the bed. ‘Let me know if there are, ah, any problems. I’ll just be sorting out some … other jobs.’

I leave the ward as quickly as possible and text Estelle, who texts back to say that she is in the hospital cafeteria with my housemate Max. Like me, they are interns—though I prefer the term ‘junior doctor’, which at least confers some sense of what the job actually entails—struggling through their first day on the wards at a major teaching hospital in Sydney.

I arrive to find them slumped over a table at the back of the cafeteria.

‘I fucking hate this,’ Estelle says as I join them. ‘I want to go home.’ She runs a hand through her long blonde hair and sighs. I watch in awe, amazed that someone can be so beautiful even when wearing an expression of extreme disgruntlement.

Two nurses walk past and give us a glance that hovers between disgust and pity. ‘The baby interns,’ I hear one say to the other, not bothering to lower her voice. ‘That time of year when the hospital death statistics, like, triple.’