Chapters (70)
- COVER PAGE
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- DEDICATION
- PROLOGUE
- PART I BIRTH
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- PART II LIFE
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- PART III DEATH
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- THIRTY-EIGHT
- THIRTY-NINE
- FORTY
- FORTY-ONE
- FORTY-TWO
- FORTY-THREE
- FORTY-FOUR
- FORTY-FIVE
- FORTY-SIX
- FORTY-SEVEN
- FORTY-EIGHT
- FORTY-NINE
- FIFTY
- FIFTY-ONE
- FIFTY-TWO
- FIFTY-THREE
- FIFTY-FOUR
- FIFTY-FIVE
- FIFTY-SIX
- FIFTY-SEVEN
- FIFTY-EIGHT
- FIFTY-NINE
- SIXTY
- EPILOGUE
- AUTHOR’S NOTE
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
‘I can’t believe this is our first day as real doctors,’ Max says dreamily, no doubt envisaging his almost-empty ward and blank to-do list. ‘I reckon I’ll finish early. I told Winnie we could have a drink to celebrate. Want to walk home with me?’
Our housemate Winnie is the only person in our group of friends who isn’t a doctor. She’s a lawyer, which she generally hates. She texts me between billable hours to ask if I’ve met any hot surgeons yet like on TV. Her favourite little joke is that if I do finally ever write my novel I should call it Fifty Shades of Grey’s Anatomy.
‘I’ll be here for hours,’ I tell Max. ‘My registrar’s at a course today so I haven’t even met her yet; I’ve sort of just been going it alone.’
The hierarchy of medicine is confusing, even for people inside the system. Interns are at the absolute bottom of the food chain. Above us are the consultants in training, or registrars. And above them are the godlike fully blown consultants, junior and senior. Most departments have a few of each. Junior consultants have a bit more to do with us interns than their senior colleagues, who are so far removed from their years as junior doctors it’s like they never happened. They spend most of their time (when they’re not on the fairway or in Aspen) making money in the private hospital. The hospital, in all its wisdom, has scheduled registrar orientation for the same time as our first day as interns, and the junior consultant who might have been able to offer me some direction has been in theatre the last five hours. I have thus spent my morning with no supervision and perpetually confused.
‘I should have stayed a stripper, I reckon,’ Estelle says suddenly. ‘I was such a good stripper.’
I’d met Estelle at the start of my medical degree when we ended up at the pub together after sneaking out of the last lecture early. Half a beer in, Estelle told me that she’d worked on and off as a stripper for the last few years, as well as engaging in some hard-core partying, but had decided it was time to go straight, so to speak. After blitzing a year of a science degree, she’d transferred across to medicine. I can still picture Estelle standing next to me in the coffee line on our first day of medical school, in her white summery dress with her Longines watch, lying through her teeth to the guy next to us that she wanted to become a doctor to save the masses. Even at the time I thought she looked like she’d be more comfortable in day spas rather than medical tents inside third-world war zones.