I can’t help but feel their lack of confidence is justified. My first night shift is approaching and it fills me with fear. The public hospital where I work—a big old rabbit warren with kilometres of corridors and staircases—is huge. And on night shift those hundreds of patients, along with a skeleton staff, will all be under my inexperienced care.

The hospital is called Holy Innocents Hospital, which is as macabre as it sounds. Despite the fact it’s almost directly on the ocean (these religious institutions always did know how to buy up good real estate), the glorious view of the waves crashing from the windows of the surgical ward is rather mitigated by the icons that loom down on us as we walk through the corridors. My favourite is an enormous painting which depicts the Massacre of the Innocents, which the hospital is named after. I said a better name would have been St Trinian’s (a bit of a personal joke that I had to explain to Max). Nothing inspires a sense of confidence in your medical team more than gigantic paintings of young children being massacred on the order of King Herod.

It’s like another planet compared with the scenes outside. Holy Innocents Hospital is in a relaxed beachside suburb in northern Sydney, and most patients who attend the place are either wealthy retirees or surf bums. It makes a good mix. One day you’ll see a stoner surfie, the next a retired barrister. It’s also not that far from the city so you also get a good mix of general bad behaviour, like people with weird things inserted in their rectums.

There is an affiliated private hospital, but that’s a good ten-minute walk up the road. The consultants like that because it means they can keep to themselves in the glorious land of private practice and stay in their ivory towers while their juniors sweat it out in the trenches. I can’t complain too much. Being so close to the water means that, hypothetically, after work I can rip off my doctor’s badge and clothes and, in a small section of the beach not seen by the general public, swim in my undies. Even on day one of doctoring the idea of that kind of freedom is truly fantastic.

‘You’ve got blood on your shirt, mate,’ Max says, removing me from my fantasy of the ocean by slurping on his milkshake. ‘Good first day then?’

‘I tried to put in a cannula,’ I admit. ‘It was a bloodbath. I left my medical student to sort it out.’

‘Yeah, that happened to me too,’ Estelle says gloomily, staring into her coffee. ‘In emergency I think I’ll have to put in heaps of cannulas. It’s awful.’

Max is shaking his head. ‘I’m so glad I haven’t started on a surgical or emergency term like you guys. Respiratory is so great.’