Max has had the incredibly good fortune of being rotated to a respiratory term in summer. Pneumonia being traditionally a winter illness, he only has two or three patients to look after. Sadly, neurosurgical patients don’t seem to have a climatic preference.

Interns operate on a system of terms. You have some choice in this, but there are standard experiences every junior doctor needs to have under their belt before the medical board deems us fit to progress. At a bare minimum, you need to do a surgical term, a medical term and an emergency term. I’ve requested nearly all surgical terms. It’s inevitable, really, that I will be a surgeon. My fate was sealed years ago in a delivery suite at the Royal Hospital for Women, with an innocuous comment by an unsuspecting midwife. I was nine minutes old.

‘Look how long her fingers are,’ the nurse said to my mother, touching my hands as she cradled me. ‘Maybe she’ll be a concert pianist …’

Mum, despite having just gone through labour, snapped to attention. ‘Maybe she’ll be a surgeon,’ she said firmly, examining my hands.

Thanks, Mum—no pressure or anything. I’m certainly doing my best to live up to my mother’s expectations. My first term is neurosurgery, before we’re shipped off to the middle of nowhere in the great Aussie outback for our rural medical secondment. Then, aside from a single mandatory term in the emergency department, I’ll spend the rest of the year inside the operating theatre. Or attempting to get in there, at least, as a lot of the time surgical interns are stuck trying to manage the catastrophes sitting on the surgical ward.

‘Why are you so keen to be a surgeon, Kitty?’ Estelle asks me now, as if reading my thoughts. ‘I hate the operating theatre.’