I’m Marco, username MedicMarco90. I’m your average junior doctor, more or less, which means you can trust me, even though I’m scrolling through medical memes on Insta, angling my phone away from the nurses, trying to take my mind off the Sisyphean workload on G6 ward as well as the cancerous lesion in my lung that’s meant to send me, in six months’ time, downstairs to palliative care.
My ageing consultant, Dr Shahzad, doesn’t know how sick I am. He emerges onto the ward with the carriage of a Middle Eastern dictator, shoulders winged by invisible epaulettes, chirruping ‘Marco, Marco,’ as if he were Italian. Not far off the mark with his Iranian accent.
‘Where do you see yourself in five years’ time?’ he purrs, registering the crisis of motivation on my face. ‘Where do you see the nhs?’
Like ‘how are you?’ it’s not a question you genuinely answer. Shahzad is doubly removed from junior doctors like me – generations older, and with the apocryphal ‘experience abroad’, in pre-revolution Iran where nurses carried out doctors’ orders without question and top-quality kabobs were served for lunch, for free.
‘The nhs is on its knees,’ I say, lamenting our lack of kabobs.
As he turns, his bald spot glints like a gigantic green olive.
‘Yes, my boy, and what’s your generation going to do once doctors like us are gone?’
‘Work harder than ever before, Dr Shahzad. Work till the day we drop dead.’
