ADAM KAY REVEALS MORE HIGHS AND LOWS DURING HIS SIX YEARS AS A JUNIOR DOCTOR I was out of ideas. Should I start looking for the patient’s stopcock or shove kitchen roll down his throat?

should be close to 100%. I started performing action after action on an autopilot mode I didn’t know I possessed. He started to perk up pretty much immediately.

A strange realization that it’s the first time I’ve actually saved a life in five months as a doctor. Everyone on the outside imagines we roam the wards performing routine acts of heroism. I even assumed that myself when I started. 8am one of the night sisters bleeps to tell me she thinks I’m a good little doctor.

I’m willing to overlook that ‘good little doctor’, because it’s the first time I’ve had anything approaching a compliment since I qualified.

The light is on in patient CR’S room, so I pop my head in to check if everything’s OK. I admitted her last week with the suspicion of an ovarian mass.

Suspicion has become a diagnosis of ovarian cancer, has become confirmation of widespread metastases, has become talk of a few months left. When I saw her, despite obvious suspicions, I didn’t say the word ‘cancer’ – I was taught that if you say the word even in passing, that’s all a patient ever remembers.

Friendly, funny, chatty, we were like two long-lost pals catching up on all our years apart. She bursts into tears, and out come all the ‘will never’s, the crushing realization that ‘forever’ is just a word on the front of Valentine’s cards. Her son will qualify from medical school – she won’t be there.

Her daughter will get married – she won’t be able to help with the table plan or throw confetti. She’ll never meet her grandchildren. Her husband will never get over it.

“He doesn’t even know how to work the thermostat!” She laughs, so I laugh. I really don’t know what to say. I want to lie and tell her everything’s going to be fine, but we both know that it won’t.

I hug her. I’ve never hugged a patient before, but I don’t know what else to do. On the way home I phone my mum to tell her I love her.

I’m off sick for the first time since qualifying. Work weren’t exactly sympathetic. “Oh, for f***’s sake,” spat my registrar when I rang in. “Can’t you come in for the morning?”

Percy and Marietta’s wedding today like a huge triumph against the o Two doctors able to get their big off work.

And the whole day too, not my former colleague Amelia, who co only wangle the afternoon of her wed day off, and ended up conducting morning clinic in full hair and make to make the timings work.

My life is starting to feel like an epis of Quantum Leap. I’ll wake up and know where I am or what I have to Today, I startle awake to a loud knoc sound – I’m in my car asleep at a of lights and an old boy rapping on the window with the ha of his umbrella.

It’s the second unexpected po nap of the night shift, after a sc nurse tapped me on the shoulder w