Abandon all hope ye who enter here
- Dante Alighieri, Inferno
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I started work as a doctor 20 years ago, when the start date was 1 August, regardless of which day it fell on. It was a Saturday. I had moved 300 miles for the job and knew no one. Home was a single room above one of the surgical wards, with a collapsed, plastic covered mattress on the bed, a worn sticky carpet and an ancient wardrobe and desk. I paged the outgoing doctor at 7.30am. She arrived, shoved her pager at me and a tattered piece of paper with about 12 names on it. “These are [the emergencies] all coming in this morning. There’s 18 people needing bloods [tests]. Get all the bloods to the lab by 8.30am or they won’t run them. I am never coming back to this fucking shithole.” She walked away.
I went to the first ward. A nurse turned from the desk and asked if I was the new house officer. I said I was. ‘Well, I’ll tell you now. you’re all fucking useless. We hate all junior doctors. And we didn’t want a bloody female one – at least the last guy was cute. Do what we tell you or we will make your life a fucking misery.’
It was utter misery. I worked from 7.30am on Saturday to 7pm on Monday with no sleep, one meal and about eight cups of cold coffee. That was standard for six months. I have no idea what the patients thought. I passed the time in a haze of exhaustion, fear and misery. Support was almost nonexistent. The only thing that kept me going was the thought of the years and years of work it had taken to reach this point – everything I had given up through my teens and early 20s in order to pass one exam after another. During those six months I know that at least five first-year juniors killed themselves or died unexpectedly in the UK. I understand why. I could easily have been one of them.
- First day on the Job---
it's always puzzled me how some senior registrars seem to carry about them an apparent resentment and palpable disdain towards medical students they've never met before - how they treat we hapless fetuses so unsympathetically - but now it all makes sense. I used to think they were just having a bad day. That it was because they didn't remember being a medical student themselves, but now I see it's the opposite. They remember it all too well. From the moment you lock eyes, the first thing that goes through their head is this: 'you lot have no idea how good you have it now.'
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