I consider this. Even as a student the surgical terms were always my favourite. The whole romance of the operating theatre appeals to me. It’s the closest you can get to treading the precarious line between controlled life and equally uncontrolled deterioration and death. And it isn’t called a theatre for no reason. It’s a stage of sorts. The surgeons are movie stars with egos to match. The patients play their role to perfection, being helpless and unconscious. Bodies are cut open, lives are saved and lost—and everyone acts as if it is just another day, which for them it is, I suppose. I’ve heard other doctors say they enjoy surgery because it’s straightforward; they can just ‘go and get things done’. It’s a world away from the complexities of human interactions with difficult patients on that other planet—the ward. But that’s not at all how I see surgery. I like the grace and precision it requires, while all the time being aware that at any moment things can go wrong, that the careful choreography of the theatre can descend into chaos. The fact that so often it doesn’t is, for me, miraculous. The operating theatre is a place where magic happens.

Estelle is staring at me. ‘Earth to Kitty …’

I snap myself back to the present. ‘You know,’ I say, in answer to her question, ‘blood and knives and power and pain and mercy and magic. It’s all in there.’

Estelle smiles. ‘There’s the Kitty Holliday I know and love: half surgeon, half writer.’

‘How’s the book going, mate?’ Max asks, upending his milkshake to drain the dregs.

I sigh. Despite the subliminal pressure to become a doctor—a surgeon, no less—I also grew up in a house full of literature with an English teacher for a mother. She instilled in me a love for language; words are my oldest and greatest friends. Mum’s texts asking if I was studying for my medical exams were always peppered with quotes from obscure poets. No wonder I have an identity crisis. It’s because I’m on the Pisces–Aries cusp, I reckon. The creative dreamer is always doing battle with the pragmatic, determined future surgeon. I write to escape, and for the last few years—ever since I started medical school—I’ve been working on a novel. But progress has been slow; there was always another anatomy lecture to attend, or exam to study for. And now that I’m finally a real doctor, my dreams of a literary life seem further away than ever.

‘Badly,’ I admit. ‘But as my mum always says: novelists starve, doctors don’t.’