back to the future

my life, filled with death and dying.

rest in peace, andrew 'bird' drendel. you lived your life with great nobility. you refused to become your disease, but rather accepted it and gained strength from it. good on you mate.

did a deal with the devil this afternoon and i'm going back to the queen elizabeth hospital for my final rotation this year, instead of doing the gastro/onc job which looked increasingly like a dud. i hope im not making a big mistake, but what the hell, palliative care is what i want to do. and i can do the onc job next year. all this is due to mika taking the rest of the year off. just one of those things, i know, but i'm sorry it's happened. hope it all goes well mate.

*
ACT FOUR, SCENE ONE

A single spotlight comes onto a bare stage. There stands GALAXY in the uniform of junior doctors: a cheap shirt, a cheap gaudy tie, cheap battered shoes, cheap well-worn stethoscope, a clipboard containing path slips and progress notes, and, of course, a pager. GALAXY is alone. He looks alone. He exudes loneliness.

GALAXY
Internship. It's supposed to be a lot of things. But what is it really? It is our first glimpse of reality, our first taste of truth. And like all truths, this one inevitably scares the shit out of you. But, again, like all truths, you cannot run away from it. (Pauses) Camus said when reality clashes with what we think the world should be like, we experience the absurd. Internship is one such experience. At the end of medical school, our ideals of medicine culminate towards graduation. And then, irreversibly, brutally, it is destroyed on our first day as interns. And every single day afterwards, it is destroyed again and again. Until, one day, we give in. (Pauses again) But Camus always points a way out of this conundrum. (A giant image of QI'S nose flashes up again, with GALAXY pushing a giant boulder up the steep incline) Like that wily old man Sisyphus, every now and then, when we've overcome a particularly difficult family member, or a particularly idiotic nurse, or got that particularly bitch of an IV cannulation, we get to feel good about ourselves, and say, hey, I'm a real doctor, and this is not so bad after all.

Curtain close