‘Sorry.’ I don’t mean it.

I order the X-ray and offer him some pain relief. I look up his file on the computer and notice he was in hospital six months earlier for punching someone at the local pub. He’d broken several bones in his hand.

When he returns to ranting about shooting the horse, I can’t take it anymore. To the amusement of the rest of the staff in the emergency department, when the patient leaves I call the police.

‘Look, I’m not sure if you can do anything,’ I say to the slightly bemused officer on the other end of the phone, ‘but I don’t think a person should be able to shoot a horse when the horse was, well, just being a horse.’

After assuring me that, no, people can’t just randomly destroy horses, the officer promises to conduct a search of my patient’s property for illegal firearms and check on the wellbeing of said horse.

‘Maybe just don’t say who it was who made the call,’ I add quickly, remembering I have to walk home alone.

‘You city doctors are mad,’ says a gruff old paramedic who stood behind me listening as I made the phone call. ‘You’re mad as cut snakes.’

Eight hours and fifteen complicated patients later, I walk home to find Max sitting on the front porch of Poo Palace. After relating how I prevented cruelty to animals from inside the emergency department, I ask him what he got up to last night.

‘Remedial drivers’ orientation, mate,’ Max informs me, grinning a bit.

‘How was it?’

‘There’s about a hundred people there and only ten of us can read,’ he explains. ‘So I was voted group leader and I helped everyone with filling in their workbooks. Everyone else in my group is over fifty.’

I’m overjoyed. This will keep us going for days.

‘That’s not even the best bit!’ Max tells me. ‘You wouldn’t have seen the local news—there was a shoot-out!’

To his horror, a local news crew showed up at the end of remedial drivers’ orientation with the intention of filming proceedings to show what a successful intervention the local community has organised. By a stroke of pure serendipity, at exactly the same time, two of Australia’s most wanted, on the run in the local area, were spotted nearby. The police immediately cordoned off the whole town, surrounded the convicts, and the media rushed off to cover the subsequent shoot-out.

‘Thank God for the escaped felons!’ Max says.

With the sun beating down on us, me still in the filthy scrubs I’ve been wearing for nearly two days, we look at each other and start laughing so hard I feel as if my stomach is going to explode. How far away we are from our inner-city life of bars and Mardi Gras and Bondi now!