Five years sounds like a long time to be studying for a degree, but in reality, it’s the briefest of moments. Five short years in which to turn perfectly predicted grades into doctors. Not only to impart vast amounts of knowledge and information, but to impart a different way of looking at the world. A different attitude, a different identity. Some wear the identity with ease, but struggle with the workload. Others pass exams without difficulty, but discover their new identity is not one with which they feel comfortable. We have five years to rectify that, to nurture and support, to prepare and tidy. At the end of those five years, we have to let someone go and hope that we have done enough.
Sometimes, we haven’t. Sometimes, they fracture. You select the highest achievers, the perfectionists, the school prefects and the sports captains, children who have spent the whole of their short lives being the best, being prize winners and medallists, being applauded and noticed and being accustomed to standing out. If you take those people and put them in a room with three hundred identical people, until no one stands out any more and those who have previously achieved A-grades with ease now have to fight and scramble just to keep up, and you add to that mix an overwhelming workload and an intense amount of pressure, it’s understandable some of them break. In all honesty, I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often.
I remember all my students, but it’s the ones who break that I remember most clearly, because I always wonder, if I had looked more closely, if I had concentrated a little better, perhaps I could have spotted the fracture lines in time. Perhaps I could have prevented it from happening.
The admissions tutor
I was a wild card.
An elderly and about-to-retire professor interviewed me for medical school, and the only other time I saw him – ironically – was graduation day. I thanked him for giving me a chance, not thinking for a second that he would remember me.
He did.
‘Each year, I would pick an outsider. A high risk. That year, I picked you,’ he said. ‘You were my wild card.’
As wild cards go, I was pretty wild.
I had left school at fifteen with only one O-level and very little else. Like many children then and many children now, we are asked to make huge decisions about what we want to do with our lives before we’ve even really discovered who we are. At fifteen I had no idea, and so I left. I decided to think about it. I ended up thinking about it for quite a while.
I did lots of other jobs as I thought. I typed letters and pulled pints, and delivered pizzas. I worked at a wonderful animal rescue centre. I waited tables. I was one of those really annoying women in department stores, the ones who try to spray you with fragrance as you walk through the shop. The ones you try desperately to avoid. I was that woman, and I spent months of my life watching people run away from me.
But I never lost a vague and quiet hope at the back of my mind that one day I would return to education. I never let go of my need to learn and I would do lots of things to satisfy that need. I would read textbooks just for fun. I watched documentaries on rare and unimaginable diseases. I did courses and workshops, and looked out for any other exposure to education, however small, that I could.
One August morning, in the summer of 2003, I saw a very basic first-aid course advertised on a postcard in a newsagent’s window. I happened to look up as I walked through the door. A chance. A small moment tied and knotted to many other small moments, that eventually joined together and led me to being a doctor. I rang and booked myself a place, and in the coffee break on that course, I told the paramedic who was teaching us how much I loved medicine and how interested I was in psychiatry, but how – in my thirties – I was too old to even consider it now. He told me I wasn’t. He told me people in their thirties, people in their forties, apply for medical school, and in a moment of wild spontaneity the very next day I enrolled to do three science A-levels. Just over a year later, I found myself sitting opposite the elderly and about-to-be retired professor in an interview room deep within the bowels of a medical school. He was concerned about my age.
‘I’m worried how you’ll cope with the workload at your age,’ he said.
‘I’m worried how you’ll support yourself,’ he said.
‘I’m worried how you’ll feel when the consultant you are working for is younger than you are,’ he said.
I brushed these remarks, and many others, away as best I could, even the last one, which made me hesitate just for a moment.
The professor leaned back and folded his arms. He stared at me in silence. I stared back. There were no more questions to answer and I decided I had nothing to lose.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘I completely understand if you reject me. Reject me because you don’t think I’m smart enough. Reject me because you don’t think I’ll make a very good doctor. Reject me for the hundred and one reasons you reject people, but please – please – don’t reject me just because of my date of birth, because that wouldn’t be a very good reason at all, would it?’
His eyebrows raised just ever so slightly. That’s it, I thought, I’ve blown it.
A couple of weeks later, the offer of a place arrived in the post.
‘Merry Christmas’ it said, handwritten at the bottom of the letter.
I couldn’t be certain, and it was never confirmed, but I think it might have been that little outburst of indignation that secured me my seat at medical school.