And there’s another bright spot on the horizon. Despite my fear that it will only lead to heartbreak, when I see on Facebook that Fabien is leaving South America and heading to Europe, I send him a message to tell him about my own trip.

Maybe we can meet at a coffee shop, he messages back as I’m wading through the Johanssen paper on glioblastoma operative outcomes.

Or we could just get really drunk at a bar, I write back.

I didn’t think doctors got drunk.

I allow myself a small smirk.

We decide we will meet. The conference only goes for a day and I assume I won’t want to be spending a huge amount of time in Sweden with surgeons I’ve never met, so I allow myself to do something that makes me truly happy. I book myself a flight to Amsterdam, and Fabien books his. We send each other screenshots of our respective e-tickets and I nearly cry with joy.

Maybe I’m just a simple creature after all. Away from the operating theatre and glioblastomas and dying children, what fills my heart is booking a flight across Europe to see the ski bum I met three years ago.

‘Being a doctor doesn’t make a person happy,’ Estelle says bluntly when I tell her this. ‘It just makes you confused.’

‘Agreed,’ Max chimes in. ‘You leave the operating theatre at midnight and feel great because you’ve just done a heart transplant or something equally hectic. But then you get home and there’s no one there, or worse a partner you’ve been cheating on every other second because you’re such a fucking mess, and all your mates are at work or asleep, then you realise you’re actually really lonely and depressed, and all you have to look forward to is waking up and going back to the hospital.’

‘That’s why you’ve got Stilnox,’ the Godfather points out.

‘To avoid all that unnecessary reflection.’

We spend our final night in Wingabby getting drunk at Poo Palace. Estelle says she has a surprise for us and produces a huge bag of oranges and a juicer.

‘I went back to the orchard Kitty and I found,’ she says, looking pleased with herself, ‘and I picked as many oranges as I could.’

I recall the rows of trees. Estelle, stricken from her terrible night shift, had found comfort among the trees and returned to pick the oranges to make vodka oranges for her friends. Life continues, glass by glass. Who says that alcohol doesn’t bring people together?

Max loves the juicer, and orange after orange goes through. Vodka after vodka is thrown back. We toast the best orange juice in the world, Max’s remedial drivers’ certificate, the Godfather’s nurse success rate, Estelle’s survival of her night shifts (just), and me finishing my research paper. We toast each other well into the night.