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Training to be a doctor

by Vo

It was a bad moment when my nice supportive tutor said at the end of one of our much-postponed supervisions, in his quiet and supportive way, that I was probably going to fail!

I was in the middle of the sixth year I had spent at St Agnes. Most other places let you resit and resit until you pass, but not here. Here you can actually fail! At the end of all that time, and worry, and expense, they can actually fail you! Or, in this case, me.

So quite a bombshell.

But only, if truth be told, because it was him saying it. I knew I had been heading for the rocks for a long time, but hadn't had anybody state the position so starkly. I had started not turning up for things from day one, I was always missing seminars, postponing tutorials, asking for extensions on essays, missing the new deadlines etc etc. Now the End was nigh.

A bit unbelievably however, having told me the bad news, my lovely Prof had a sliver of good to follow up with.

I was a very bright student, apparently, and could still, if I wanted it enough, pull the fat from the fire.

What I needed was a detailed list of everything I had to do between now and Then, and a schedule which timetabled each of them to be completed within the months that were left. And the magic ingredient: sign up to a binding promise to keep to it, week by week - or, week by week, to accept the consequences.

Consequences?

He didn't say what these would be! My promise would be to accept whatever he thought necessary to impose...

That sounded bad. But as he explained in his quiet and understanding way, I would have to think them likely to be absolutely terrible or the prospect of them wouldn't get me galvanised!

Mmmm.

Well: it was a plan. And a plan was quite definitely what I needed.

I returned later that day with the schedule, and got to sign the Form. Yes, there was a Form, not a lot on it, but numbered points in very large black font...

"Excellent," said the Prof, once he had added his own signature to mine (mine absolutely legible, since I had yet to qualify(!), and so glaring up at me at the bottom of that Fausty-looking Form).

"We have it under control, that's really well done." the Prof went on. "It will be a desperate few months, but we will do it."

I loved the 'we'.

"Yes, I'm so grateful," I said, feeling about 500% less confident than he was pretending to be.

"So, next Thursday then. And by then you will have completed " - he consulted the schedule - "the reports for the labs of weeks 2, 3 and 4 of the semester before last and a first draft of your pathology project, 15,000 words."

Well, now it was spoken out loud, I couldn't possibly!

The Prof saw what was happening I think. "That sounds a bit heavy to me. Maybe let's leave the write-ups until you're motoring. Just get that draft done."

"OK, yes, thankyou, I could do that," I heard myself saying.

"I had better let you get on with it then." My signal to make for the door. "Doesn't have to be good, Julia: just done." I reached the door. "Oh, 'appropriate dress'," he said. "It's on the hanger there."

There was a gray raincoat on the back of the door.

"You wear it while you are on the catch-up programme for all your hospital business - labs, wards, library, supervisions, everything. Just to register your commitment, a sort of membership badge."

"Oh, right," I said, uncertainly, still working out how I was going to produce 15,000 words on a topic a Year One on an ASBO knew more about by next Thursday.

"Just see if the size is right."

"Size?"

"Your badge - the coat - just see if it fits."

I put down my bag, peeled the mac off its hanger and slipped it on.

"Yes, it's fine, " I said.

"Belt," he prompted. "You wear it with the belt done."

"Oh, right." That's two thousand words a day! I pulled the belt tight and did the buckle.

"Excellent," he said.

"Two thousand! A day!" I said to myself.

"Excellent!" repeated the Prof.

I went to take it off. He stopped me: "No, you are signed up now. For all hospital business remember."

So. I was signed up. Two thousand words a day!

"Oh, right, fine, thankyou" I mumbled, picking up my bag and opening the door.

Never crossed my mind how convenient it was that a mac of my size had been there on the door ready and waiting.

I couldn't face the library (so what was new??) and headed back to the flat, undoing my belt - it was hot, not raincoat weather at all. And almost immediately got a short sharp lesson in what my 'badge' was all about! Someone was shouting across the quad, "Nurse! Nurse!" It was so shrieky that I looked up. It was the horrible vixen from Ward Ten. Ilsa, they called her. And she seemed to be shouting at me! "Nurse, Nurse, do yourself up Nurse! You are at St Agnes now! Your belt! No nurse at St Agnes goes about with her belt undone!"

It was the mac - it was the sort, I suddenly realized, the new student nurses have to wear.

Should I have gone across and put her right - told her I wasn't a student nurse and wasn't to be shouted at in that outrageous fashion?

In fact I flushed furiously, did my belt up, took an interest in the pavement, and hurried to the flat.

I suppose I was thinking of being told I was going to fail as much as the humiliation of being mistaken for a fresher nurse at the very bottom of the hospital pecking order.

I had to steel myself up to venture forth in my new uniform the next day. I found myself inspecting my turn-out in the mirror several times as I got my other things together, going over every detail of my mac to make sure no one could shout at me again! Was the skirt hanging properly? The flaps at the front lying square? The epaulettes straight? The sleeve straps neat? My belt, needless to say was buckled up tight as a drum!

So Ilsa made quite an impact on the start of my new regime, making me acutely aware that I was into something new. But as far as my nice old Prof was concerned, I started out assuming he would be satisfied with signs of effort on my part and treat the schedule he had got me to devise as 'aspirational'. So when I failed, predictably, to clear the very first hurdle, I came out, true to form, with all the usual guff about not being able to get hold of the books, having to visit my Mum who had got flu, feeling a bit headachy myself, just needing another day etc etc. and expected him to listen and indulge.

I was half-right: he listened.

But then, quietly and supportively as ever, he asked me to sit at the computer and fill in the on-screen form and it would tell me what I should do.

Alas, no room to type in my 'explanation'! Just a series of boxes to tick, kicking off with:

With him in the room 'No' was the only possible response if the one and only permitted alternative was 'Yes'! It had the grace to ask in that case if I had submitted a certificate of incapacity or illness signed by a doctor(!!) and if not had I any 'proof of bereavement'.

So - rather quickly - we got onto 'the consequences'.

Basically, they turned out to be Back to School, perfectly doable. But it was a very old-fashioned school they took you back to and I was 24, not 14. I didn't like doing any of them one little bit, and the ones the machine resorted to towards the end, were, shall we say, powerfully motivating.

Thinking about that first time still makes me squirm. I couldn't believe I wasn't going to be let off. But the big letters in Times Roman spelled it out with unmistakable clarity:

Oh Lordy! What on earth would it be?

Oh! What a relief! A joke!! It was all an elaborate joke!

"It says I've got to stand in the corner!" I told the Prof, laughing.

But no laughing from the Prof!

"OK," he said in his absolutely standard quiet supportive tone. "Just get into position and tell me when you are ready to start."

He was taking it seriously! I really was going to have to stand in the corner!

"That one will do," he said as I was working this out, pointing behind just him on his left, where there was indeed a corner in his small consulting room free of furniture where I could stand.

"Oh, OK," I said, as cool as I could, the situation sinking in.

"You want me to do it now?"

"Well, that's what you say it says - ?"

"Right. OK," I said, still not really bringing myself to move. "I'll do it now then."

No further contribution from the Prof.

And so, in the silence, no alternative but to go over to where he had indicated.

I got there. Then, still stalling:" Which way do I have to face?"

"Oh, you had better check. It should make everything clear on the screen."

I went back to the machine and had to hit the back button to get the punishment displayed again.

And then it threw a pop-up:

Oh! Unfair!! How was I to know how the thing worked - my very first time!

"Now it says I have to have my hood up!" I cried out loud to no one in particular, tension showing through rather.

"OK, OK," said the Prof in his calm way, "it's only a machine, just do as it says, no problem."

Yes, yes, he was right of course. Putting my hood up was no problem.

I pulled it up and it slithered over my head, making that liquid rustly noise those macs are always making.

"I have to ask you to check," I dutifully explained to the Prof, holding my head up for him to inspect, trying to make a joke of it, but hot and red with embarrassment.

"That looks fine," he said. Standing up and leaning across the desk: "But you just need to button the tab."

I didn't know there was a tab. He did it up for me, pulling a flap from the collar right across my mouth and doing up the button. "You look really cosy in there!"

Well, with the mackintosh flap across my mouth and its hospital smell engulfing my nostrils, 'cosy' was not quite the word I would have used myself. In fact I can't find a word which covers the play of embarrassment, excitement (that hospital smell always creates an a weird whisper of excitement for me - Lord knows why), relief (at having someone else taking charge of my dire situation), sweat (sorry to be so doctorish, but 'sweat' is actually the shortest word for the bodily fluid being drawn out of me in quantities by my embarrassment, the mac and the hood), confusion, surprise,- and, I suppose, not that I want to admit it, the plain and simple humiliation of being punished like a schoolgirl and seen being punished by my Prof.

Such was the concoction of emotions surging through me as I stood, obediently, in the corner of the stifling room, buckled and buttoned into my shame-making mackintosh, waiting for the fifteen slow minutes to pass.

There was plenty of variety in the consequences I was to accept in the months that remained. And basically, because the time to finish things got shorter and shorter, as I have hinted, the machine thought they had to get more and more deterrent ...

But, in the end, it worked.

Three weeks before the big D the Prof, bless him, showed his confidence that I was going to pull it off by urging me to apply for a Research Fellowship he was advertising. "It's down to the Committee, of course, but I would certainly back you. Now you can keep to deadlines, more or less (!) you are going to make a very successful career."

The Prof's backing on a St Agnes' committee was a guarantee, no less, so I knew I had a great job waiting for me if ... : a final carrot perhaps which maybe he judged I needed to keep it all together in those final sleeplessly hectic three weeks.

We had a private drink in his room after the appointing committee had met.

"You should keep your uniform, I think?" he said in his quiet and supportive way.

Pause.

"Oh, I should love to, thank you. It has come to mean so much to me."

Was I being ironic? Even I didn't know! The mac had become synonymous with enormous angst, but it had also seen me through a really challenging time.

"Good. Very good," he said. "I think perhaps we should run your induction along similar lines to your catchup programme?"

Pause.

"Oh, yes, good idea," I heard myself saying. "I'm afraid that seems to be how I work best, with someone keeping me up to the mark."

"Thursdays at six o'clock shall we say? - properly dressed of course."

"With my hood up to begin with?" I said, promptly this time, catching on.

"Yes, good, that will be excellent," he said - with maybe just a hint of an edge to his almost always unvarying quiet and supportive tone...

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