Pathology is one option: I loved lab work at school, and samples are hard to kill. But to qualify, I’ll still have to go through the grim F1 and 2 foundation years, right at the bottom of the medical pile. On one placement, I met a Senior House Officer only three years my senior who was meant to care for fifty surgical patients overnight. I don’t know that I’ll ever be ready . . .

Do all med students feel like this, deep down? Certainly, we can’t admit to nerves.

The pills have been the only thing to mute my self-doubt, but I need to change that.

Kerry is waiting for a reply. I laugh and say, ‘I’ve already decided what to do. I’m going to run away and join the circus.’

She nods. ‘So, we’re talking animal bites, spinal injuries, eye trauma from juggling balls, allergic reaction to clown paint? I’d say that makes you an emergency medicine doctor.’

That’s the most terrifying specialty of all. ‘Yeah, that’s me, Brighton’s answer to George Clooney.’

But as the plane taxis, I can’t help thinking that A & E or even a circus ring teeming with tigers might be preferable to what lies ahead at the end of the flight. I’ve spent years clinging on to the status quo. What the hell have I signed up for?

We step out of the airport into hot, multicoloured chaos. Kerry slept on the flight, but I didn’t, which is adding to my trance-like state. My body floats on waves of soggy warmth as we step between people and cars and cows and potholes full of rainwater the colour of strong tea.

Monsoon season.

The hospital has arranged a driver, so we follow him to his car, and Kerry sits in the front, chatting away. I pretend to sleep in the back, shivering from the fierce air-con in here.

Yet I can’t keep my eyes closed: there is too much to see. I had feared I would hate it but instead, the world beyond the cab window fills me with an unfamiliar feeling. Excitement. Everything is unknown, and so am I. Perhaps this can really be a fresh start.

Energy pulses through me, as powerful as any drug. For the last few years, I’ve thought that I needed to take pills because I was burning out. But what if the opposite is true? That I needed drugs not because I was overwhelmed by life, but because I need more of it than Brighton and Hazelmere Crescent and my mother’s bluebell-scented living room have to offer?

‘What exactly are you doing here?’ the surgical director asks, peering over his spectacles.

Jetlag means I can’t quite process the question.

‘Sorry, I thought we had an appointment?’ I compare my watch to the clock on the wall, wondering if I got the time zones wrong, but they both say ten o’clock.