And this is my collegue, Dr Sham....

I love on-calls. I really do. I love it when the hospital goes quiet and the minorly-ill and injured go home, leaving only the sick and the dying. Not to mention the patients :-p

Seriously, I do though. I like the sense of camaradie that develops between staff members, I like the dimly lit corridors, and I like the buzz you get half-way through the night. (Which is why I loved O&G, although that had the added bonus of a baby at the end).

What's really great here are the on-call meal tickets. Those who say there's no such thing as a free lunch should come to Canada. Far from the stale, unidentifiable meat sandwiches of a Grand Round back home, here you get a ticket purely for monetary value in the canteen. Given the currency conversion, and the fact everything here is so much cheaper, I'd say it's probably worth around £6. You can take anything you want from the canteen up to that value (and if you don't use enough, the canteen staff encourage you to take more food up to that value.) It's all very exciting.

(Listen to me: the perennial student...I worry one day I'll be a consultant still getting excited over free food while my students giggle at me, and call me Dr Cheapskate behind my back)

Something I'm having problems with: talking to psychotic patients. In French. In perculiar French. But at least now I can say in another language "Sometimes, when people feel a bit low, they hear voices when there's no-one in the room. Has this ever happened to you...?"

Something else I've noticed is that I get introduced by other doctors to patients as "Dr [surname-let me call myself Dr Anonymous for now]". At first I thought it was because they assumed I had qualified, but it turns out all medical students here are Dr ..., followed by 'my student' or something like that. I'm in two minds about this. I'm quite used to being called "[first name], one of our student doctors". I'm also used to having "Doctor!" shouted at me by old ladies who need their catheters changing (or more likely, being female: "Nurse!") But Dr Anonymous ? On the one hand, I feel completely unqualified, as if it's a fraudulent title and all the patient hears is the word 'doctor' and assumes I am one. Having never heard myself called Dr Anonymous before, it also sounds very strange to my ears, as though, after five and a half years of this, I think of myself as a permanent medical student, but never a doctor.

On the other hand, I quite like it :-)

* * *

It seems the last post gave the impression that psychiatry was a bit 'hocus-pocus' and not really very scientific. That wasn't really what I meant at all. What I meant was this: Just as it takes a certain kind of doctor to tell people day after day after day they've got cancer (and you can know all you want in the world about gene mutations and abnormal mitoses, but it doesn't help when they look you in the eye and say "Well? What did the test results show?"), it takes a certain type of doctor to ask someone why they wanted to end their life, and for the patient to trust them enough to tell them. And the people I work with do it so well, I'm completely inspired.


That's enough for tonight. Dr Anonymous is going to sit around practicing being a doctor, not thinking about free lunch.